Atwood's narrator really is very passive, though. Both adaptations (film and series) make her a lot more active than she ever is in the book. From what I remember Atwood wrote it as a partial critique of the Gen X feminists, because she thought we were too passive and unpolitical. The narrator's mother is a very typical seventies radical feminist, and she and her daughter clash repeatedly over that. To me one of the big things the book is about is what happens when good people do nothing, or just kind of determinedly keep their heads down.