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The Perverse Seductions of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’
American women have never been freer. So why are we drawn to depictions of our own repression?
We are living in Gilead.
When Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, became a hit Hulu series in the early months of the Trump administration, this observation began to take on the contours of a mantra. Set in a not-too-distant future in which Christian extremists have overthrown the U.S. government and established a theonomic surveillance state called Gilead, the novel is premised on a fertility crisis, a result of which all women capable of bearing children have been turned into surrogacy slaves for the elite classes. Called handmaids, these women wear conspicuous bonnets and red capes designed to hinder escape and are valued only for their ability to produce babies, which they relinquish upon birth.
The whole scenario is about as over the top as it gets. Still, amid the roiling concerns about totalitarianism in the wake of the 2016 election, Atwood’s 30-plus-year-old cautionary tale began to look prophetic to plenty of liberals.
“Texas is Gilead and Indiana is Gilead and now that Mike Pence is our vice president, the entire country will look more like Gilead, too,” Sarah Jones wrote in the New Republic in the wake of newly proposed abortion restrictions in those states.
In May 2017, when House Republicans voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, proposing legislation that would potentially deny coverage to women who were survivors of rape or even in need of C-sections, Twitter lit up with images of handmaids in the Rose Garden and jokes about not being able to distinguish C-Span from Hulu.
‘The Testaments’ at times feels less like a sequel than an attempt to sustain the fan-driven freak-out engendered by the television series.
A few months earlier, Atwood had published her lengthy and more circumspect consideration of The Handmaid’s Tale’s relationship to the current political moment. The novel, she insisted, was not a prediction of the future, because the future is impossible to predict. “There are too many variables and…
