Margaret Atwood And The Handmaid’s Tale

However, the feminist movement—at least in America—suffered a lull in the 1980s. The movement had achieved much of its platform in the 60s and 70s and found less popular support under the conservative presidency of Ronald Reagan. In 1985, Margaret Atwood published her breakthrough novel The Handmaid’s Tale. A native Canadian, Atwood earned her master’s degree at Radcliffe College (then the women’s school at Harvard University) in 1962 during the early stages of American second-wave feminism. In The Handmaid’s Tale, she imagined a totalitarian Christian theocracy which has overthrown the United States government and subjugates the few remaining fertile women to enforced attempts at procreation.

Yet unlike Russ and Carter, Atwood did not intend The Handmaid’s Tale as a feminist dystopia. “In a feminist dystopia pure and simple, all of the men would have greater rights than all of the women,” she wrote in a 2012 article. She continued:

“It would be two-layered in structure: top layer men, bottom layer women. But Gilead is the usual kind of dictatorship: shaped like a pyramid, with the powerful of both sexes at the apex, the men generally outranking the women at the same level; then descending levels of power and status with men and women in each, all the way down to the bottom, where the unmarried men must serve in the ranks before being awarded an Econowife.”

Instead, Atwood intended her novel as a throwback to classic dystopias like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451. Indeed, part of the appeal of The Handmaid’s Tale stems from Atwood’s ability to draw a scarily prescient American society out of rampant Islamophobia and religious fundamentalism. If not completely realistic, one can at least connect the dots between late 20th-century America and Gilead. In Atwood’s words:

“I made a rule for myself: I would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time, or for which the technology did not already exist. I did not wish to be accused of dark, twisted inventions, or of misrepresenting the human potential for deplorable behaviour.”

Like Orwell and Bradbury before her, Atwood extended her critical observations of society into a fictional nightmare.

Whatever Atwood’s intentions, there is no question The Handmaid’s Tale was a critical and popular success. It won the 1985 Canadian Governor General’s Award for English-language fiction and the inaugural Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987, and was nominated for the 1986 Nebula Award, 1986 Booker Prize and 1987 Prometheus Award. Long before the recent Hulu adaptation, it was adapted into a 1990 film and a 2000 opera. Since it was first published, it has never been out of print and has sold millions of copies around the world.