The Handmaid's Detail: Notes on the Novel and Opera

When Margaret Atwood's dystopia or 'speculative fiction,' as she terms it, The Handmaid's Tale first appeared in 1985, it aroused considerable interest because of the topicality of its theme and the wealth of supporting detail. In a recent interview, Atwood made this remark: '"What inspired The Handmaid's Tale?" I've often been asked. General observation, I might have said. Poking my nose into books. Reading newspapers. World history. One of my rules was that I couldn't put anything into the novel that human beings hadn't actually done' ('For God'). The Atwood papers in the Fisher Rare Books Library of the University of Toronto provide ample evidence of her newspaper reading (box 96). Events both in Iran and Afghanistan (which Atwood had visited) showed only too clearly the repression of women and girls in matters relating to education, dress, and sex. What was striking about this novel, however, was the presentation of a similar tyranny arising in the United States in the closing years of the twentieth century.

This totalitarian regime is called the Republic of Gilead, a name derived from part of the Promised Land shown to Moses by the Lord (Deuteronomy: 34:1–4). This positive image represents the one that the new theocracy wishes to project. In fact, however, by abolishing the Constitution along with the title of the United States, the authorities have conveniently abandoned the former separation of church and state. A religious minority directs a police state with arbitrary powers of arrest and public execution. The true face of Gilead stands revealed in another biblical quotation:

Gilead is a city of them that work iniquity, and is polluted with blood.
And as troops of robbers wait for a man, so the company of priests murder in the way by consent: for they commit lewdness.

(Hosea 6:8–9)

This is the religiously depraved spirit that informs this dystopia.

Atwood herself has drawn attention to the work's lineage ('For God'), citing The Republic, Utopia, book 4 of Gulliver's Travels, and Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1920). Nearer to home are Brave New World (1932) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), to which I shall return. She engages also in a dialogue with the Old Testament, especially Genesis, and indeed with the English language itself. The fact that the heroine, Offred, was formerly a librarian confers plausibility on the various word coinages and games permeating this first-person narration.

The Novel

In the closing years of the second Christian millennium, a series of disasters (cf the biblical plagues in Egypt) occurs in the United States. In particular, earthquakes along the San Andreas fault in California cause nuclear power plants to explode, releasing radioactivity which inflicts widespread devastation. The escape of toxic wastes and dioxins produces rapidly escalating levels of cancer and infertility. Social and political instability ensues, which prompts a fundamentalist Christian movement to impose order through a violent coup d'état. Offred, the Handmaid, recalls: 'It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time' (183). With the Constitution suspended, the new regime creates a patriarchy. All women's bank accounts are transferred into their male relative's name. By law, women are forbidden to read or write. All printed materials are burned. Libraries thus close; all media become state-controlled.

Those women still capable of conception are removed and forced, after a program of indoctrination at the Red Centre, to become 'handmaids' or 'two-legged wombs' to childless élite couples. Any child conceived belongs automatically to the couple. Any handmaid who, after three such postings, still proves unable to conceive falls under threat of banishment to the 'Colonies,' where they slave with women past childbearing age and others socially unacceptable in clearing toxic waste until they succumb.

Traumatized by forcible separation...