The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale is a 1985 dystopian novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood. The novel explores themes of women in subjugation, and the various means by which they gain agency, against a backdrop of the establishment of a totalitarian theocratic state. Sumptuary laws (essentially, dress codes) play a key role in the form of social control in the new society.

Social critique

Atwood's tale presents a number of social critiques.

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It presents a dystopic vision of American society in the period 1970–1985, particularly in the period of backlash against feminism. This critique is most clearly seen in both Offred's remembrance of the slow social transformation towards theocratic fascism, and in the ideology of the Aunts.

Related Topics:
1970 - 1985 - Backlash - Feminism - Fascism - Ideology

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Atwood also presents a critique of modern fundamentalist religious movements, including American fundamentalist Baptist Christianity, and Iranian fundamentalist Islam. In the American case, a religious revival of the mid-1970s seemed to remain particularly influential in the early 1980s. Jimmy Carter, a US president during the period, had avowed his renewed and reaffirmed Christianity. Additionally, the religious right was growing as a power base through televangelism and other revivalist techniques. In the book, Atwood pictures revivalism as a counter-revolutionary doctrine, opposed to the revolutionary doctrine espoused by Offred's mother and Moira, which sought to break down gender categories. A common Marxist historical reading of fascism states that fascism is the backlash of the right after a revolution has failed. Atwood plays on this Marxist reading of class, and translates its analysis into the structure of a gender revolution.

Related Topics:
Baptist - Christianity - Iran - Islam - Religious revival - 1970s - 1980s - Jimmy Carter - US president - Religious right - Televangelism - Marxist - Fascism

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Similarly, in the Iranian revolution, an alliance of Western cultured intellectuals advocated modernism and Marxism. This revolutionary ideal was defeated by an alliance of predominantly rural and proletarian Islamic clerics. Women played a key role in the Islamic revolution, and became both paramilitary enforcers of Islamic gender codes, and occasionally secret gender police. At the time the novel was written, it was a common fear that women would be completely disempowered by the revolution. Contemporary feminist critiques of Iranian society recognize that some Islamic institutions, and the "revolutionary myth" associated with pro-Islamic women, have empowered some Iranian women.

Related Topics:
Proletarian - Paramilitary

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Finally Atwood offers a critique of contemporary feminism. By working against pornography, feminists in the early 1980s favored censorship, and thus cooperated with the religious right. Atwood warns that the consequences of this alliance may end up empowering feminists' worst enemies. Atwood also suggests, through the character of Moira, that contemporary feminism was becoming a leadership or activist cult, offering ordinary women little assistance in empowering themselves or breaking down sexism in their immediate lives.

Related Topics:
Pornography - 1980s - Censorship - Cult

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