Warning: Spoilers Ahead
Do you remember the flashback sequences in The Handmaid's Tale, back to the centre where Offred and the others were taught to be Handmaids? One of the aunts tell them that they are pioneers; life will be easier for the women who come after them because they won't know any different.That kind of sums up the environment of Only Ever Yours. In a world where no women are born - because women are so undervalued and so many female foetuses were aborted that they can no longer be carried to term - eves have taken their place. Eves are women created from certain specifications, raised to live as companions or concubines to the young men of their society. Others will be chastitys - the 'aunts' of this world - and are given the names of saints.
Personally, I don't believe it. I don't believe the eves are gestated in a lab. I don't believe women died off either, naturally selected out by the choices of humanity, quite apart from the fact that natural selection wouldn't work that way. How does aborting female foetuses result in less men creating x-chromosomes? Perhaps the couples who ended up with more children were those who naturally conceived more sons? But that would take thousands of years surely, and there'd still be lots of women left when the problem began to be strongly felt.
I suspect a larger conspiracy and women in cages somewhere, being forcefully impregnated with designer embryos.
Returning to the book; freida - no women's names are capitalised, in a stylistic choice reminiscent of e e cummings and 'Offred' - is an eve. She's in her sixteenth year, the year in which some women will be chosen as companions while others are designated as concubines.Something I'd like to comment on here - the eves receive regular 'Organised Recreation' sessions in order to combat 'female hysteria'. "Any hysterical, overemotional girl behaviour is deliberately induced in a controlled environment until the urges dissipate".
Here's what wikipedia has to say on female hysteria;
Female hysteria was a once-common medical diagnosis, made exclusively in women, which is today no longer recognized by medical authorities as a medical disorder. Its diagnosis and treatment were routine for many hundreds of years in Western Europe. [1] Typical treatment was massage of the patient's genitalia by the physician and, later, by vibrators or water sprays to cause orgasm.
The eves are designed to look like famous, beautiful women and are given the same names. There's megan, agyness, liu, tyra, and those are just the ones I've been able to place. We can assume that freida herself resemble Freida Pinto.
freida comments on how alike all the girls look. Through some are designed to look more 'exotic', their features are whitewashed. Like barbie-dolls; the only change is skintone and hair/eye colour. Liu, for instance, is designed to look Japanese, according to freida, but her features are essentially European; see But Not Too Black.
In this world where every women/'eve' is designed to be a natural ten, there are still subdivisions. The difference between a 10.1 and a 10.2 becomes much larger and more important. What I'm trying to say is that in a world where all women are beautiful, there are still many who do not feel beautiful enough.
freida feels fat and ugly. freida is rejected by a snobbish potential father-in-law based on her skin-tone, despite this literally being a palette swap. She's not a specific race and nor does she have a different heritage from the other eves; she literally just has slightly darker skin. freida is bullied. freida feels like any teenager girl with a tendency towards eating disorders, despite all of the factors that you think might change that.
The author mentions, in the acknowledgements, that this is what she wanted to capture. She wanted to express the feeling of inadequacy in being a teenage girl. That's where the Mean Girls part of the comparison comes in.
There are other things that haven't changed. The eves are fans of a show called Keeping up with the Carmichaels. One of the Carmichaels, cassie, has a black eye given to her by her husband. The eves comment on this;
'He's yummy,' jessie sighs. "He could hit me any day he wanted.'
'I'd let him make shit of me,' megan says, the three of them now laughing hysterically.
It's barely even a parody. More a set of quotes.
...and here's a few more.
When freida meets the Inheritants - the young man she and the other eves were bred to please - she falls for one of them, the son of the aforementioned judge. He's the best of a bad lot; he doesn't try to rape her and then call her a slut. He doesn't talk down to her. He tries to connect as equals. But that isn't possible, because he simply has no idea what her life is like. He is incapable of understanding, and he is ill-equipped to try. He is a sixteen-year-old boy who has never stepped outside the bounds of conventional society. Darwin cannot save freida (in a rather nice stealth pun, Darwin, or at least, natural evolution, is cited as the reason freida is in this situation in the first place). Darwin will be one of the most powerful men in their society in a few years, but will he be a better man?
Darwin took me back to my teenage years too. As a teenage girl life wasn't any fun without a crush. That's actually still the case today. So, in the absence of anyone truly crush-worthy men (or boys) you pick out the best of a bad lot, just to have one. Darwin's fulfils that role; freida has been told that the entire purpose of her life is to please men, so she latches on to the first man who isn't utterly crap.
frieda's best friend, isabel, cannot save her. Formerly the #1 eve, isabel spends the year struggling with her own demons. As her weight swings up to 150lbs (about 5lbs less than I weigh now) she is mocked for being lazy, for being obese, for being fat and greedy. As we find out at the end, she has been chosen as the third wife of the Father - the leader of this world. As the book ends, we find that she has committed suicide.
No one can save freida. freida ends the book being sent 'underground' - put into a vat and used for experiments. In a world where no one is sufficient to save freida, no one does. I spent the book believing this would not be the case, but I honestly cannot think of an alternate ending that would be true to what had been built up so far.
I can see a sequel in this. One which explores the wider world of the eves. One in which Darwin repents and matures, growing and becoming a better man, one who might save freida. One in which isabel, the strongest character, is able to use her power for the greater good, in order to save freida. One in which freida - drugged and ineffective as she is - is able to save herself. I'd quite like to find out what happens next in this world.
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