The Handmaid’s Tale

By Margaret Atwood (1986)

You’ve seen the headlines, “The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s coming true! It’s real!” It is? Women in the United States are being forcibly abducted and repeatedly raped in the name of population growth? That’s quite a surprise. I would have expected that to be on the news.

American women of child-bearing age have to wear outlandish costumes, act as a devout mob and are not educated? Oh, no, I’ve got that wrong. That’s only the howling, rainbow-clad sufferers of TDS.

The Handmaid’s Tale, apart from its apparent prescience, is vaunted as a feminist tale of great power and brilliance. It is nothing of the kind. It’s a mildly entertaining potboiler, built on a ludicrous and misandristic premise. Our protagonist (known only as Offred because at this time she belongs to a “Commander” in the new order known as Fred, get it?) endures a lonely and futile existence. She is a mere vessel, her sole purpose to produce a child for the Commander and his wife.

The USA has become Gilead, which, we vaguely understand, is a hyper-fundamentalist, militarised Christian state, after a few years of rumblings and then a massacre of the government. Canada has stayed out of this and treats Gilead as a tourist stop. The rest of the world seems to be a toxic dump where naughty women are sent.

Atwood sweats to make it clear that the regime is extraordinarily vigilant and brutal. Unfortunately, this traps her protagonist in such repression that she has to break the rules time and time again without being caught. Or there is no story. After Atwood has impressed upon us the all-seeing nature of Gilead’s enforcers, Offred gets away with breach after breach of the apparently inescapable laws.

As a thought experiment this fails badly. It’s a bitsy, unconvincing polemic. Like Offred we wait. We wait for the inevitable black van to snatch someone off the street. It does. We wait for the Nazi reference. It comes. We wait for the big character reveal. Here it is.

Really, leave it to Orwell.