The Handmaid's Tale
The Handmaid's Tale is a futuristic dystopian novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood published in 1985. It is set in a near-future New England in a patriarchal, totalitarian theonomic state known as the Republic of Gilead, which has overthrown the United States government. Offred is the central character and narrator and one of the "Handmaids": women who are forcibly assigned to produce children for the "Commanders", who are the ruling class in Gilead.
The novel explores themes of powerless women in a patriarchal society, loss of female agency and individuality, suppression of reproductive rights, and the various means by which women resist and try to gain individuality and independence. The title echoes the component parts of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, which is a series of connected stories. It also alludes to the tradition of fairy tales where the central character tells her story.
The Handmaid's Tale won the 1985 Governor General's Award and the first Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987; it was also nominated for the 1986 Nebula Award, the 1986 Booker Prize, and the 1987 Prometheus Award. In 2022, The Handmaid's Tale was included on the "Big Jubilee Read" list of 70 books by Commonwealth authors, selected to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II. The book has been adapted into a 1990 film, a 2000 opera, a 2017 television series, and other media. A sequel novel, The Testaments, was published in 2019.
Plot summary
After staging an attack killing the President of the United States and most of United States Congress, a radical political group called the "Sons of Jacob" uses theonomic ideology to launch a revolution. The Constitution of the United States is suspended, newspapers are censored, and the United States is reformed into a military dictatorship known as the Republic of Gilead. The new regime quickly consolidates its power, overtaking all other religious groups, including Christian denominations.The regime reorganizes society using a peculiar interpretation of some Old Testament ideas, and a new militarized, hierarchical model of social and religious theonomy is established among its new social classes. One of the most significant changes is the limitation of women's rights. Women are relegated to the lowest-ranking class and are denied the right to own property, read, and write. Women are deprived of control over their reproductive functions. Although the regime controls most of the country, various rebel groups continue to operate.
The story is told in the first-person by a woman named Offred, considered a criminal for trying to escape to Canada with a forged passport with her husband and five-year-old daughter; she is also considered an adulterer for being married to a divorced man. Her marriage was forcibly dissolved, and her daughter was taken from her. Instead of being sentenced under the Republic of Gilead's draconian criminal justice system, Offred accepted training to become a "Handmaid" at the Rachel and Leah Centre, an alternative only available to fertile women: environmental pollution and radiation have drastically affected fertility, and she is one of the few remaining women who can conceive. She has been assigned to produce children for the "Commanders", the ruling class of men, and is made a Handmaid, a role based on the biblical story of Rachel and her handmaid Bilhah.
Women are classed socially and wear uniforms, ranked highest to lowest: the Commanders' Wives in sky blue, their unmarried daughters in white, the Handmaids in red with obvious large white bonnets, the Aunts in brown, the Marthas in green, Econowives in blue, red and green stripes, and widows in black.
Offred details her life, starting with her third assignment as a Handmaid to a Commander. Interspersing narratives of her present-day experiences are flashbacks of her life before and during the beginning of the revolution, including her failed escape, indoctrination by the Aunts, and her friend Moira's escape from the indoctrination facility. At her new home, she is treated poorly by the Commander's wife, Serena Joy, a former Christian media personality who supported women's domesticity and subordinate role well before Gilead was established.
To Offred's surprise, the Commander asks to see her outside of the "Ceremony", ritualized rape conducted during the Handmaids' likely fertile period each month, with the wives present, intended to result in conception. His request to see her in the library is illegal in Gilead, but they meet nevertheless. They primarily play Scrabble and Offred is allowed to ask favors of him, such as information or material items. He asks Offred to kiss him "as if she meant it" and tells her about his strained relationship with his wife. Finally, he gives her lingerie and takes her to a covert, government-run brothel using Jezebels, women forced into sanctioned sex slavery. Offred unexpectedly encounters an emotionally broken Moira there, who tells her that those found breaking the law are sent to the "Colonies" to clean up toxic waste or are allowed to work as Jezebels as punishment.
In the days between her visits to the Commander, Offred also learns her shopping partner, a woman called Ofglen, is with the Mayday resistance, an underground network working to overthrow Gilead's government. Not knowing of Offred's criminal acts with her husband, Serena begins to suspect that he is infertile, so she arranges for Offred to have sex with Nick, the Commander's personal servant, who had attempted to talk to her before and shown interest. Serena offers Offred information about her daughter in exchange. She later brings her a photograph of Offred's daughter, which leaves Offred feeling dejected, as she believes she has been erased from her daughter's life.
After their initial sexual encounter, Offred and Nick begin to meet on their own initiative as well; she discovers that she enjoys these intimate moments despite memories of her husband, and shares potentially dangerous information about her past with him. Offred later tells Nick that she thinks she is pregnant.
Offred hears from a new walking partner that Ofglen has disappeared. She contemplates suicide when Serena finds evidence of the illegal relationship with the Commander. Shortly afterward, men arrive at the house wearing uniforms of the secret police, known as the Eyes of God or simply "Eyes", to take her away. As she is led to a waiting van, Nick tells her to trust him and go with the men. Offred is unsure if Nick or the men are Eyes or secretly members of Mayday, or if they are here to capture her or aid in her escape; she ultimately enters the van. Her future remains uncertain, while Serena and the Commander are left bereft in their house, each contemplating the repercussions of Offred's capture on their lives.
The novel concludes with a metafictional epilogue, described as a partial transcript of an international historical association conference taking place in the year 2195. The male keynote speaker explains that Offred's narrative was initially recorded on a set of audio cassettes, a technology roughly 200 years outdated at that time, and later transcribed by historians. The speaker appears to be very dismissive of the misogyny of Gilead and interprets the story's title as a sexist joke. He also comments on the difficulty of authenticating the account, due to how few records have survived from the early years of Gilead's existence, and speculates on the eventual fates of Offred and her acquaintances.
Background
Fitting with her statements that The Handmaid's Tale is a work of speculative fiction, not science fiction, Atwood's novel offers a satirical view of various social, political, and religious trends of early Puritanism in the United States. Atwood notes that "ations never build apparently radical forms of government on foundations that aren’t there already," and further describes the novel's setting as a potential cover story for how someone might seize power in the United States. Such a situation, argues Atwood, would "need only the opportunity of a period of social chaos to reassert itself."Atwood argues that all of the scenarios offered in The Handmaid's Tale have actually occurred in real life—in an interview she gave regarding her later novel Oryx and Crake, Atwood maintains that "As with The Handmaid's Tale, I didn't put in anything that we haven't already done, we're not already doing, we're seriously trying to do, coupled with trends that are already in progress... So all of those things are real, and therefore the amount of pure invention is close to nil." Atwood was known to carry around newspaper clippings to her various interviews to support her fiction's basis in reality. Atwood has explained that The Handmaid's Tale is a response to those who say the oppressive, totalitarian, and religious governments that have taken hold in other countries throughout the years "can't happen here".
Atwood was also inspired by the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1978–79 that saw a theocracy established that drastically reduced the rights of women and imposed a strict dress code on Iranian women, very much like that of Gilead. In The Handmaid's Tale, a reference is made to the Islamic Republic of Iran in the form of the history book Iran and Gilead: Two Late Twentieth Century Monotheocracies mentioned in the endnotes describing the historians' convention in 2195. Atwood's picture of a society ruled by men who professed high moral principles, but are in fact self-interested and selfish was inspired by observing Canadian politicians in action, especially in her hometown of Toronto, who frequently profess in a very sanctimonious manner to be acting from the highest principles of morality while in reality the opposite is the case.
During the Second World War, Canadian women took on jobs in the place of men serving in the military that they were expected to yield to men once the war was over. After 1945, not all women wanted to return to their traditional roles as housewives and mothers, leading to a male backlash. Atwood was born in 1939, and while growing up in the 1950s she saw first-hand the complaints against women who continued to work after 1945 and of women who unhappily gave up their jobs, which she incorporated into her novel. The way in which the narrator is forced into becoming an unhappy housewife after she loses her job, in common with all the other women of Gilead, was inspired by Atwood's memories of the 1950s.
Atwood's inspiration for the Republic of Gilead came from her study of early American Puritans while at Harvard, which she attended on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. Atwood argues that the modern view of the Puritans—that they came to America to flee religious persecution in England and set up a religiously tolerant society—is misleading, and that instead, these Puritan leaders wanted to establish a monolithic theonomy where religious dissent would not be tolerated.
Atwood has a personal connection to the Puritans, and she dedicates the novel to her own ancestor Mary Webster, who was accused of witchcraft in Puritan New England but survived her hanging. Due to the totalitarian nature of Gileadean society, Atwood, in creating the setting, drew from the "utopian idealism" present in 20th-century régimes, such as Cambodia and Romania, as well as earlier New England Puritanism. Atwood has argued that a coup, such as the one depicted in The Handmaid's Tale, would misuse religion in order to achieve its own ends.
Atwood, in regards to those leading Gilead, further stated:
I don't consider these people to be Christians because they do not have at the core of their behaviour and ideologies what I, in my feeble Canadian way, would consider to be the core of Christianity... and that would be not only love your neighbours but love your enemies. That would also be "I was sick and you visited me not" and such and such...And that would include also concern for the environment, because you can't love your neighbour or even your enemy, unless you love your neighbour's oxygen, food, and water. You can't love your neighbour or your enemy if you're presuming policies that are going to cause those people to die.... Of course faith can be a force for good and often has been. So faith is a force for good particularly when people are feeling beleaguered and in need of hope. So you can have bad iterations and you can also have the iteration in which people have got too much power and then start abusing it. But that is human behaviour, so you can't lay it down to religion. You can find the same in any power situation, such as politics or ideologies that purport to be atheist. Need I mention the former Soviet Union? So it is not a question of religion making people behave badly. It is a question of human beings getting power and then wanting more of it.
In the same vein, Atwood also declared that "In the real world today, some religious groups are leading movements for the protection of vulnerable groups, including women." Atwood draws connections between the ways in which Gilead's leaders maintain their power and other examples of actual totalitarian governments. In her interviews, Atwood offers up Afghanistan as an example of a religious theocracy forcing women out of the public sphere and into their homes, as in Gilead.
The "state-sanctioned murder of dissidents" was inspired by the Philippines under President Ferdinand Marcos, and the last General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party Nicolae Ceaușescu's obsession with increasing the birth rate led to the strict policing of pregnant women and the outlawing of birth control and abortion. However, Atwood clearly explains that many of these actions were not just present in other cultures and countries, "but within Western society, and within the 'Christian' tradition itself".
The Republic of Gilead struggles with infertility, making Offred's services as a Handmaid vital to producing children and thus reproducing the society. Handmaids themselves are "untouchable", but their ability to signify status is equated to that of slaves or servants throughout history. Atwood connects their concerns with infertility to real-life problems our world faces, such as radiation, chemical pollution, and sexually transmitted disease. Atwood's strong stance on environmental issues and their negative consequences for our society has presented itself in other works such as her MaddAddam trilogy, and refers back to her growing up with biologists and her own scientific curiosity.
Atwood has described writing The Handmaid's Tale in an array of locations. In a 2018 article for LitHub, she recalls that she started the manuscript in spring 1984 while living in West Berlin, returned to Canada in June 1984, writing there through the fall, and then finished the book in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where she held an MFA chair in the University of Alabama's English department for 1985's spring semester. The copyright page of the novel contains the line "The author would like to thank the D.A.A.D in West Berlin and the English department at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, for providing time and space." Atwood has said that the first person to read the manuscript was her friend and fellow novelist Valerie Martin, who was also teaching at Alabama. Atwood's memory is that Martin offered some mild praise along the lines of "I think you’ve got something here,” while Martin remembers her immediate reaction was more like, "you're about to be rich!"