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Margaret Atwood’s rule for herself when writing “The Handmaid’s Tale” was that everything had to be based on some real-world antecedent. And she was able to combine disparate historical events in plausible — and horrific — ways.

Hulu’s TV adaptation of her novel does the same; even when the show expands the world established in the novel and adds scenes that weren’t in the original material, they “could have been, because they have precedents,” Atwood said in a phone interview. Ahead of the Season 1 finale on Wednesday, Atwood explained the historical basis of the book and the show’s most disconcerting elements.

‘The Handmaid’s Tale’

Where to watch: Hulu

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Episode 1: Color-Coordinated Clothing

A scene from “The Handmaid’s Tale.” George Kraychyk/Hulu

The women of Gilead all wear clothing and colors prescribed by their status in this society: red for handmaids, blue for wives, green for Marthas, brown for aunts. “Organizing people according to what they’re wearing — who should wear what and when, who has to cover up what — is a very, very, very, very old human vocation,” Atwood said. It dates back to the first known legal code, the Code of Hammurabi, one part of which stated that “only aristocratic ladies were allowed to wear veils,” she added.

“If you were caught wearing a veil, and if you were in fact a slave, the penalty was execution,” Atwood continued. “It meant that you were pretending to be someone that you were not.”

The handmaid’s garb comes from a variety of sources (mid-Victorian bonnets and veils, nun wimples). Atwood’s trip to Afghanistan in 1978 — where she wore a chador — was also an influence. “They weren’t imposing it on everybody, at that point,” she said. “They did later.” All of these codes of attire — including the Third Reich’s yellow stars for Jews and pink triangles for gays — were ways of “identifying people, controlling people,” she said. “It’s easy to see at once who this person is.” The handmaid’s assigned color, red, was used by Canada for its prisoners of war, Atwood added, “who had the privilege to wear because it shows up so very well in the snow.”

The red is also borrowed from Christian iconography of the late-medieval, early Renaissance period, she said, in which “the Virgin Mary would inevitably wear blue or blue-green, and Mary Magdalene would inevitably wear red.”

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Episode 1: Mob Justice

A scene from “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Hulu

Gilead likes its ceremonies, and it has one to punish political enemies or disruptive elements that also acts as a release for the otherwise tightly controlled handmaids. The women stand in a circle and collectively participate in an execution, in some cases by tearing the accused apart with their bare hands. In the novel, it is called a “particicution,” a portmanteau of the words participation and execution. “When the mob takes over, no one person is responsible,” Atwood said. And this kind of frenzied murder party has a very old precedent, she added, citing “the Dionysian revels of ancient Greece,” in which Maenads tore apart sacrificial victims for the god Dionysus.

The mob will sometimes demand justice. “During the French Revolution, Princesse de Lamballe was torn apart and had her head put on a pike, which was paraded under the window of Marie Antoinette,” Atwood said. “And in Émile Zola’s novel ‘Germinal,’ which is based on real-life 19th century coal-mining enterprises, the guy who runs the company store is exacting sex from the wives and daughters of the coal miners in order to sell them goods because they didn’t have any money. So when the women get the chance, they tear him apart, and put not his head but his genitalia on a pike, and parade it around.”

Episode 2: Forced Childbearing

Elisabeth Moss, center, and Madeline Brewer, right, in “The Handmaid’s Tale.” George Kraychyk/Hulu

We get an early peek at how ends justify means in Gilead when Janine gives birth and can’t accept the reality that she will not get to keep the child. “There are a lot of utopias and dystopias based on economics, but this is one that goes to the absolute root, which is how many people are you going to have?” Atwood said. “And how are you going to get them? In some cultures, you don’t have to make special laws about it. But in other cultures, you have to bring in oppression to get the results that you want.”

Tyrants and dictators like Adolf Hitler and Nicolae Ceausescu have often dictated the terms of fertility and criminalized those who did not comply. “It’s no accident that Napoleon banned abortion,” Atwood said. “He said exactly why he wanted offspring — for cannon fodder. Lovely!”

An added wrinkle, of course, is that the handmaids aren’t just being forced to give birth, they’re being forced to be surrogates, and the children they bear are then forcibly taken from them and placed with high-ranking officials. After a military junta took power in Argentina in 1976, as many as 500 young children and newborns were “disappeared,” only to be adopted by military and police couples. Hundreds of thousands of children of indigenous populations in Canada and Australia were separated from their families. “It must have been public in that it wasn’t a secret, but it also wasn’t known at the time,” Atwood said. “Nobody registered that this was happening. And it was probably presented like, ‘Oh, we’re giving these children a wonderful opportunity. We’re sending them to school.’ You see how that could sound?”

Episode 4: Declaring Women Barren

Elisabeth Moss in “The Handmaid’s Tale.” George Kraychyk/Hulu

It’s not initially questioned in the show why women would be used to solve the fertility woes of the period — until Offred visits a doctor who offers to help her out. Turns out, the Republic of Gilead has never considered the other half of the equation: men.

“There’s some confusion about this, because here you have Aunt Lydia saying it’s the wives who are barren,” Atwood said. “And for centuries and centuries, that’s what people thought. They thought it was the woman’s fault.” King Henry VIII kept changing wives (and the state religion), Atwood noted, adding: “That’s why Anne Boleyn knew she was doomed when she had that miscarriage. The idea was that the child was fully formed inside the seed of the man, and his seed was simply planted in the woman, the way you’d plant a seed in a field.”

A book titled “Eve’s Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History” by Robert S. McElvaine is illuminating on this front, she said. “You said a piece of land was barren, you said a woman was barren. You said a piece of land was fertile, you said a woman was fertile.”

In the show, the doctor knows otherwise. As does Serena Joy when she decides that Offred should use Nick. “That’s one of the things Anne Boleyn was accused of — having sex with her brother in order to produce a child,” Atwood said.

Episode 5: Why Ofglen Does What She Does

A scene from “The Handmaid’s Tale.” George Kraychyk/Hulu

Ofglen has very few options once the resistance can no longer make use of her, and she opts for a last, desperate act of resistance, taking out a few guards with a stolen vehicle. It’s a departure from the book, but Atwood said she approved. “Do you remember the Buddhist monk who set himself on fire?” she asked. “José Martí, during the war with the Spanish, went into battle knowing he wouldn’t come out,” she continued, referring to the Cuban revolutionary who died in the Cuban War of Independence. “I think people do these things because otherwise they’ve been totally defeated. They know it’s not going to work in the present moment, but down the line, they are an example to others.”

Episode 6: The Mexican Ambassador

Zabryna Guevara in “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Hulu

“The Hulu team made their Offred more active than my Offred,” Atwood said. “Partly because it’s a television series, and partly because it’s an American television series.” Offred would never have been able to stand up for herself or ask for help from a foreign emissary in the novel. The Mexican trade delegation visit doesn’t happen in the book. There is a scene in the novel in which Offred encounters some Japanese tourists, who she assumes are trade delegates, but she can’t honestly answer their pointed question, “Are you happy?” In the show, however, Offred speaks up to Ambassador Castillo when she has the opportunity — and she finds a way to get a note out to the outside world.

Atwood said ambassadors of neutral countries have often acted as conduits. In World War II, an Italian journalist named Curzio Malaparte reported from the Eastern Front, and he found a way to get out the news of what the Germans were really up to. “He was keeping these papers sewn into his coat and in the soles of his shoes and he smuggled them out through the diplomats of neutral countries,” Atwood said. “You have to trust people a lot to do that!”

Episode 8: The Black Market Club

Elisabeth Moss and Joseph Fiennes in “The Handmaid’s Tale.” George Kraychyk/Hulu

Offred reunites with Moira at Jezebel’s, a brothel where powerful men go to conduct business and indulge in illicit sex and other escapades. It’s also a thriving black market for commoners and, more to the point, the Mayday resistance. Atwood said she was rereading a book by Norman Lewis, “Naples ’44,” which describes the black market that was tolerated by the Allies in Naples, Italy, during World War II “because they were helping to run it!”

“All of this stuff is so old,” she continued, “black markets, special clubs with items you can’t get elsewhere, information exchanged through subterranean conduits.”

In the Audible special edition of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” listeners learn that there is actually a chain of Jezebel brothels, some with golf courses. “Because of course women could no longer play golf,” Atwood said. “This has actually been a complaint of female politicians, that all these special deals and secret conversations and understandings are reached at golf clubs, and if you don’t play golf, you’re just out of it.”

Episode 9: The Mayday Resistance

A scene from “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Hulu

Atwood did a huge amount of research on the resistance movements in various countries during World War II. One of her old friends, now deceased, was a member of the French Resistance, and he parachuted behind enemy lines to help funnel downed British airmen out of France. “His job was to interview them, to make sure they were really British, not Germans pretending to be British in order to reveal the underground lines of communication,” she said. “So they would ask about where they came from, football scores and such, and if you figured out that they were really German, they were shot. Just like that.”

She also met members of the Polish and Dutch resistance movements. “The people I met, of course, were the people who made it through,” she said. “Many others did not.” As evidence, she cited the members of the White Rose, who were caught distributing anti-Nazi papers and executed, and the female British spies who sometimes doubled as assassins. Using female agents, Atwood said, has been a tactic employed by resistance movements and Islamic extremists, and the handmaids’ outfits make them especially well suited for keeping secrets. “Just look at all the places where you could hide things!” she said, laughing. “Big sleeves! Tuck it in your stocking. Nobody’s going to look.”