Future-Telling
This novel began life as a short story inspired by fear of what seemed at the time America’s worst nightmare scenario: an impossibly unqualified, intellectually stunted man ascending to the Presidency despite getting fewer votes than his opponent who would initiate a reactionary hardcore conservative agenda designed to move the country closer toward fascism than ever thought possible. By the time the novel was actually published, those seemed like good times. A story of dystopic rule of a minority of patriarchal white men intent on using the power of states’ rights to manipulate the federal government into embracing its orthodoxy. Is that the state of American which the novel predicts or the state of America in which it is read? That one might even be moved to wonder is a testament to Erdrich’s prescience.
Patriarchal Control
The novel has often been compared to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in its presentation of a future where rebellion against longstanding patriarchal domination results in a radicalization movement to protect it from extinction with extreme measures to maintain control. While Atwood’s vision is distinctly darker, the future for women in this story is not exactly a cake walk. At the heart of all dystopic vision of preservation of the patriarchy is absolute imposition of autonomy over reproductive rights and the process of giving birth becomes in this novel a biological process carried out entirely under the control and authority of the government. The theme is explored in a way that suggests those who control the delivery of the population ultimately control that population.
Christian Extremism and Political Change
The title references a doctrine of evangelical Christianity which during the period immediately following the novel’s publication reached a height not witnessed since the medieval days of John of Leyden. The day when God or one of His messengers is going to return to earth and fulfill all the right-wing fever dreams of true believers is always just around the corner of the near future. When the predicted day comes and goes with no change at all, the inevitable result is not one of introspection, realization and rejection, but simply to embrace wholeheartedly the next predicted date in the future. Evangelical Christian fundamentalist dogma is the engine driving the move to the radically conservative government in the novel and was also the fuel burning the rise of Donald Trump in the real world. The centerpiece of this theme in the story is made manifest by billboards emblazoned in all caps and which reinforce already strongly held tenets of the faith like: “GET READY TO RAPTURE.” The link between the ideological bent of extremist Christianity in the novel and that in the real is one that blurs the line between fiction and history
