Many readers are surprised to hear Atwood’s novel labeled science fiction, but it belongs squarely in the long tradition of near-future dystopias which has made up a large part of SF since the early50s. SF need not involve technological innovation: it has been a long-standing principle that social change can provide the basis for SF just as well as technical change. The Handmaid’s Tale is partly an extrapolation of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, attempting to imagine what kind of values might evolve if environmental pollution rendered most of the human race sterile.
It is also the product of debates within the feminist movement in the 70s and early 80s. Atwood has been very much a part of that movement, but she has never been a mere mouthpiece for any group, always insisting on her individual perspectives. The defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, the rise of the religious right, the election of Ronald Reagan, and many sorts of backlash (mostly hugely misinformed) against the women’s movement led writers like Atwood to fear that the antifeminist tide could not only prevent further gains for women, but turn back the clock.
Dystopias are a kind of thought experiment which isolates certain social trends and exaggerates them to make clear their most negative qualities. They are rarely intended as realistic predictions of a probable future, and it is pointless to criticize them on the grounds of implausibility. Atwood here examines some of the traditional attitudes that are embedded in the thinking of the religious right and which she finds particularly threatening. But another social controversy also underlies this novel.
During the early 80s a debate raged (and continues to rage, on a lower level) about feminist attitudes toward sexuality and pornography in particular. Outspoken feminists have taken all kinds of positions: that all erotica depicting women as sexual objects is demeaning, that pornography was bad though erotica can be good, that although most pornography is demeaning the protection of civil liberties is a greater good which requires the toleration of freedom for pornographers, however distasteful, even that such a thing as feminist pornography can and should be created.
The sub-theme of this tangled debate which seems to have particularly interested and alarmed Atwood is the tendency of some feminist anti-porn groups to ally themselves with religious anti-porn zealots who oppose the feminists on almost every other issue. The language of “protection of women” could slip from a demand for more freedom into a retreat from freedom, to a kind of neo-Victorianism. After all, it was the need to protect “good” women from sex that justified all manner of repression in the 19th century, including confining them to the home, barring them from participating in the arts, and voting.
Contemporary Islamic women sometimes argue that assuming the veil and traditional all-enveloping clothing is aimed at dealing with sexual harassment and sexual objectification. The language is feminist, but the result can be deeply patriarchal, as in this novel. Without some sense of the varying agendas of mid-20th-century feminists and the debates among those agendas this novel will not make much sense.
Women who participated in the movement from the late sixties and early seventies responded to this novel strongly, often finding it extremely alarming. Younger women lacking the same background often found it baffling. Ask yourself as you read not whether events such as it depict s are likely to take place, but whether the attitudes and values it conveys are present in today’s society. Atwood’s strong point is satire, often hilarious, often very pointed. Humor is in short supply in this novel, but it is a satire nonetheless.
Atwood’s love for language play (apparent in the anagram of her name she uses for her private business “O. W. Toad”) is a major feature of the protagonist of this novel. Her jokes are dark and bitter, but they are pervasive. There are numerous biblical references in the following notes. You shouldprovide yourself with a Bible, preferably a King James Version, which is whatAtwood uses most of the time.
Or use a great searchable http://tuna. uchicago. edu/homes/BIBLES. html. ductio ad absurdum, a theoretical exercise designed to stimulate thought about social issues ratherthan a realistic portrait of a probable future by comparing herself to JonathanSwift, who in A Modest Proposal highlighted the hard-heartednessof the English in allowing the Irish masses to starve by satirically proposingthat they should be encouraged to eat their own children. It is not so obviouswhat the application of the third epigraph is to this novel. It seems to saythat no one needs to forbid what is undesirable.