Channel 4’s The Handmaid’s Tale is not really fiction, or dystopia, at all

Channel 4’s The Handmaid’s Tale is not really fiction, or dystopia, at all

The Handmaid’s Tale is a terrifying piece of dystopian fiction. But what makes it so much harder to stomach is the fact that it’s not really fiction, or dystopia, at all.

The women’s march was amazing, but what comes next?

In fact, the events of the book-turned-TV drama, which aired on Sunday night on Channel 4, are currently happening around the world as we speak – and it’s not hyperbole to say the eventual possibility of a real life Gilead creeps ever closer with each day.

The Handmaid’s Tale is set in a near future when the government has been overthrown after a staged attack that kills the President and most of Congress, and now a totalitarian theocracy has turned the former United States Of America into Gilead.

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The United States Constitution has been suspended under the pretext of restoring order and very, very quickly, the rights of women across the country are stripped and society is reorganised with a militarised hierarchical regime of Old Testament-inspired social and religious fanaticism.




The opportunity to watch the drama unfold on TV had many viewers gripped and also unsettled, as the TV show introduced the women who can still bear children and are kept for reproductive purposes; now known as ‘handmaids’, these women lose everything that made them who they were – names, families, children, jobs – and are given new names that identify them simply as the women owned (Offred and Ofglen, for example, are women ‘of’ Fred and Glen.)

The handmaids tale so far – unsettling yet gripping. — Joanne Wardle (@joannewardle) May 28, 2017

Twenty minutes in and The Handmaids Tale is just as disturbing as the book. #channel4 — Janet Minto (@JanetMinto) May 28, 2017

Already raging at the injustice #handmaidstale — Helen F (@positivefridays) May 28, 2017

Have been looking forward to seeing #handmaidstale but also scared, I'm fully anxiety ridden. — Roisin (@RoRoSuperRo) May 28, 2017

For centuries women have given up their names for men and childbirth has been ruled by men, while the uniforms that the Handmaids are forced to wear also remind us of the regimes which have for years forced women to cover-up under the name of religion, and those with only a passing knowledge of the current state of US politics will still be able to see the similarities between the horrors of the book and the horrors of real life.

The shocking election of President Donald Trump in November 2016 has seen the rights of women across America already cut in the five months since he took office; there have been crackdowns on abortion access throughout the states, and one of Trump’s first moves was to cut US overseas funding to NGO’s that provide abortion services.

Both of these actions were heavily supported by the country’s so-called religious right.

The handmaids are forced to wear a uniform (Picture: Hulu)

Elsewhere, Yazidi women are being used by Isis as collateral damage in the terror groups campaign to eradicate the Yazidi people and ‘purify’ the regions of Iraq where the ethnically Kurdish religious community live.

They are routinely rounded up as slaves and suffer unspeakable brutality as they are given to faithful Isis soldiers in Isis-controlled territories.

And in Nigeria it is thought that more than 2,000 women and girls have been abducted by Boko Haram, including the 276 schoolgirls who were kidnapped from their secondary school in Chibok in 2014; these girls and women live a daily life under oppression from men and Unicef released a report in 2016 that revealed that the girls who are released return to a life of suspicion and discrimination.

Speaking in 2017 to the LA Times, the author of The Handmaid’s Tale Margaret Atwood admitted that ‘totalitarianism always has views on who shall be allowed to have babies and what shall be done with the babies’.

In The Handmaid’s Tale the handmaids are forced to bear children for the families they are owned by, and the children are then raised by the women of the men they are forced to have sex with.

Alexis Bledel as Ofglen (Picture: Hulu)

‘For instance, the generals in Argentina were dumping people out of airplanes. But if it was a pregnant woman, they would wait until she haaby and then they gave the baby to somebody in their command system. And then they dumped the woman out of the airplane,’ said Atwood.



‘Hitler stole his children, blond ones, hoping that he could turn them into blond Germans. It’s been going on for really a long time. The United States has traditionally taken the view that your private life was your private life as long as you didn’t frighten the horses, do unacceptable things in public. But they seem to have made an exception for that in the case of women’s bodies. So you have in fact a purportedly liberal democracy claiming agency over other people’s bodies.’

Women in Gilead are treated as second-class citizens (Picture: Hulu)

In Gilead, the protests came too late to stop the coup by the Christian fundamentalist movement calling itself the Sons of Jacob, but in real life, let’s not forget that the day after Trump’s election, millions of women across the globe marched attacking Trump’s controversial campaign and offensive ‘grab them by the p***y’ comments, and voices are continuously spreading across social media which allow us to discover and fight back against the oppression of women across the world.

As Atwood said in 1986 to The New York Times: ‘I delayed writing [The Handmaid’s Tale] for about three years after I got the idea because I felt it was too crazy.

‘Then two things happened. I started noticing that a lot of the things I thought I was more or less making up were now happening, and indeed more of them have happened since the publication of the book. You could say it’s a response to “it can’t happen here”. ‘When they say “it can’t happen here,” what they usually mean is Iran can’t happen here, Czechoslovakia can’t happen here. And they’re right, because this isn’t there. But what could happen here?’


That question is one that doesn’t bare thinking about… but one we must remember every day.

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