Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) is set in the near future, after the overthrow of the US government. Women’s rights have been quickly eroded as the new Republic of Gilead has restructured society according to an ultra-conservative religious framework. The narrator and central protagonist, Offred, a powerless concubine or ‘handmaid’, tells the story of her life within the household of Commander Fred and his wife Serena Joy.
In a newspaper interview published in 1986, Margaret Atwood asked, ‘If a woman’s place is in the home, then what? If you actually decide to enforce that, what follows?’ In fleshing out one possible answer to this fundamental question, The Handmaid’s Tale reflects a perceived contemporary anti-feminist backlash against the progressive social change that had taken place in previous decades. While many of Atwood’s fears about women’s rights, religious fundamentalism and a major nuclear or environmental meltdown have not in fact come to pass in the USA, if we look at our world today it is possible to see The Handmaid’s Tale as at least partially prophetic when we consider issues such as:
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