The Handmaid's Tale is a futuristic dystopian novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood published in 1985. It is set in a near-future New England in a patriarchal, totalitarian theonomic state known as the Republic of Gilead, which has overthrown the United States government. The protagonist, a woman named Offred, occupies the role of a "Handmaid": women who are forcibly assigned to bear children for high status men.
The novel explores themes of powerless women in a patriarchal society, suppression of reproductive rights, and the various means by which women resist and try to gain individuality and independence. The title echoes the component parts of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, which is a series of connected stories (such as "The Merchant's Tale" and "The Parson's Tale"). It also alludes to the tradition of fairy tales where the central character tells her story.
The Handmaid's Tale won the 1985 Governor General's Award and the first Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987; it was also nominated for the 1986 Nebula Award, the 1986 Booker Prize, and the 1987 Prometheus Award. In 2022, The Handmaid's Tale was included on the "Big Jubilee Read" list of 70 books by Commonwealth authors, selected to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II. The book has been adapted into a 1990 film, a 2000 opera, a 2017 television series, and other media. A sequel novel, The Testaments, was published in 2019.
Plot
In the near future, the Sons of Jacob, a radical political group inspired by the Old Testament, assassinate the president of the United States and most of Congress, and reform the United States into a theonomic military dictatorship known as the Republic of Gilead. The ruling class of Gilead, known as Commanders, severely limit women's rights. Women are denied the right to read and own property, and are deprived of reproductive rights. Women's ranks are indicated by the colour and design of their clothing: the Commanders' Wives are clad in blue, their unmarried daughters in white, the Handmaids in red with white bonnets, the Aunts (who train and indoctrinate the Handmaids) in brown, the Marthas (cooks and maids) in green, and the Econowives (the wives of lower-ranking men) in blue, red and green stripes.
During the revolution, a woman is caught while attempting to reach Canada with her husband and five-year-old daughter. Because her husband was formerly married, she is considered an adulterer by Gilead's draconian criminal justice system and her daughter is taken from her. She is forced to become a Handmaid, a role based on the biblical story of Rachel and her handmaid Bilhah, and assigned to produce children for the Commanders. Her name, Offred, is a patronymic constructed of "of" and the first name of the head of her household; Handmaids' names change as they change households.
Offred describes her life. Interspersed between the narrative of her present-day experiences are flashbacks of her life before and during the revolution, including her failed escape, indoctrination by the Aunts, and her friend Moira's escape from the indoctrination facility. At her new home, she is treated poorly by the Commander's wife, Serena Joy, a former Christian media personality who supported women's domesticity and subordinate role well before Gilead was established. Offred is subjected monthly to the "Ceremony", a ritualized rape by the Commander conducted during a Handmaid's likely fertile period, with the wife present, intended to result in conception.
To Offred's surprise, the Commander illegally arranges meetings with her alone in his library. He plies her with games of Scrabble, and offers her information and material items in return. Finally, he gives her lingerie and takes her to a covert, government-run brothel, where she unexpectedly encounters Moira. In the days between her visits to the Commander, Offred also learns her shopping partner, a woman called Ofglen, is with Mayday, an underground resistance network working to overthrow Gilead's government.
Serena begins to suspect that her husband is infertile, so she arranges for Offred to have sex with Nick, the Commander's personal driver. Serena provides Offred with information about her daughter in exchange, and brings her a photograph. After their initial sexual encounter, Offred and Nick begin to meet on their own initiative; eventually, Offred tells Nick that she thinks she is pregnant.
Serena finds evidence of Offred's illegal relationship with the Commander. Shortly afterward, the secret police arrive to take her away. As she is led to a waiting van, Nick tells her to trust him and go with the men. Offred is unsure if Nick or the men are Eyes or members of Mayday, or if they are here to capture her or aid in her escape; she ultimately enters the van. Her future remains uncertain, while Serena and the Commander are left bereft in their house, each contemplating the repercussions of Offred's capture on their lives.
The novel concludes with a metafictional epilogue: a partial transcript of an international historical association conference taking place in 2195. The male keynote speaker explains that Offred's narrative was initially recorded on a set of audio cassettes, and later transcribed by historians. The speaker comments on the difficulty of authenticating the account, due to how few records have survived from the early years of Gilead's existence, and speculates on the eventual fates of Offred and her acquaintances.
Composition background Atwood described The Handmaid's Tale is a work of speculative fiction rather than science fiction. The novel offers a satirical view of various social, political, and religious trends of early Puritanism in the United States, which she studied while attending Harvard on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. Rejecting the notion that Puritans came to America to flee religious persecution in England by establishing a religiously tolerant society, Atwood argues that Puritan leaders wanted to establish a monolithic theonomy where religious dissent would not be tolerated. Atwood maintains that "nations never build apparently radical forms of government on foundations that aren't there already," and further describes the novel's setting as a potential process for how someone might seize power in the United States. Such a situation, argues Atwood, would "need only the opportunity of a period of social chaos to reassert itself."
Atwood argues that all of the scenarios offered in The Handmaid's Tale have actually occurred in real life — in an interview she gave regarding her later novel Oryx and Crake, she said that "As with The Handmaid's Tale, I didn't put in anything that we haven't already done, we're not already doing, we're seriously trying to do, coupled with trends that are already in progress [...] So all of those things are real, and therefore the amount of pure invention is close to nil." She was known to carry around newspaper clippings to her various interviews to support her fiction's basis in reality, and has said that The Handmaid's Tale is a response to those who say the oppressive, totalitarian, and religious governments that have taken hold in other countries throughout the years "can't happen here".
Atwood was inspired by the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1978–79 that saw a theocracy established that drastically reduced the rights of women and imposed a strict dress code on Iranian women, very much like that of Gilead. In The Handmaid's Tale, a reference is made to the Islamic Republic of Iran in the form of the history book Iran and Gilead: Two Late Twentieth Century Monotheocracies mentioned in the endnotes describing the historians' convention in 2195. Atwood's picture of a society ruled by men who professed high moral principles despite selfish motives was inspired by her observations of Canadian politicians, especially those of her hometown Toronto, who she argues frequently profess their actions to be founded in moral principles.
During World War II, Canadian women took on jobs in the place of men serving in the military that they were expected to yield to men once the war was over. After 1945, not all women wanted to return to their traditional roles as housewives and mothers, leading to a male backlash. Atwood was born in 1939, and while growing up in the 1950s she saw first-hand the complaints against women who continued to work after 1945 and of women who unhappily gave up their jobs, which she incorporated into her novel. The way in which the narrator is forced into becoming an unhappy housewife after she loses her job, in common with all the other women of Gilead, was inspired by Atwood's memories of the 1950s.
Atwood dedicated the novel to her own ancestor Mary Webster, who was accused of witchcraft in Puritan New England but survived her hanging. Due to the totalitarian nature of Gileadean society, Atwood, in creating the setting, drew from the "utopian idealism" present in 20th-century regimes, such as Khmer Rouge Cambodia and Communist era Romania, as well as earlier New England Puritanism. Atwood has argued that a coup, such as the one depicted in The Handmaid's Tale, would misuse religion in order to achieve its own ends.
Atwood, in regards to those leading Gilead, further stated:
I don't consider these people to be Christians because they do not have at the core of their behaviour and ideologies what I, in my feeble Canadian way, would consider to be the core of Christianity ... and that would be not only love your neighbours but love your enemies. That would also be "I was sick and you visited me not" and such and such ...And that would include also concern for the environment, because you can't love your neighbour or even your enemy, unless you love your neighbour's oxygen, food, and water. You can't love your neighbour or your enemy if you're presuming policies that are going to cause those people to die. ... Of course faith can be a force for good and often has been. So faith is a force for good particularly when people are feeling beleaguered and in need of hope. So you can have bad iterations and you can also have the iteration in which people have got too much power and then start abusing it. But that is human behaviour, so you can't lay it down to religion. You can find the same in any power situation, such as politics or ideologies that purport to be atheist. Need I mention the former Soviet Union? So it is not a question of religion making people behave badly. It is a question of human beings getting power and then wanting more of it.
In the same vein, Atwood also declared that "in the real world today, some religious groups are leading movements for the protection of vulnerable groups, including women." Atwood draws connections between the ways in which Gilead's leaders maintain their power and other examples of actual totalitarian governments. In her interviews, Atwood cites the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan as an example of a totalitarian religious theocracy forcing women out of the public sphere and into their homes, as in Gilead.
Gilead's "state-sanctioned murder of dissidents" was inspired by the Philippines under President Ferdinand Marcos, and the last General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party Nicolae Ceaușescu's obsession with increasing the birth rate (Decree 770) led to the strict policing of pregnant women and the outlawing of birth control and abortion. However, Atwood argues that many of these actions were present not just in other cultures and countries, "but within Western society, and within the 'Christian' tradition itself".