The Politics of the Handmaid's Tale

In Canada, they said, 'Could it happen here?' In England, they said, 'jolly good yam.' In United States, they said, 'How long have we got?' Such were reactions, according to an interview that Margaret Atwood gave to The New York Times, to her futuristic novel The Handmaid's Tale. The British response is calmest, viewing work, that is, purely as fantasy, like Alice in Wonderland or Lord of Rings. Canadians feel, apparently, some modest degree of apprehension. But it is in America, where tale is set, that reaction has been most intense, most alarmed. By now a canonical text (the self-important term that academics use for books that get taught a lot) in university courses, source of a film and an opera, a work particularly revered by pessi-feminists, The Handmaid's Tale has been widely viewed as a serious commentary on socio-political conditions of day. I want to cast a critical eye on putatively American way of responding to Atwood's tale. Read seriously (in contrast to pure fantasy), book belongs to genre called dystopia, a genre that projects an imaginary society that differs from author's own, first, by being significantly worse in important respects and, second, by being worse because it attempts to reify some utopian ideal. Science fiction works like Pohl and Kornbluth's The Space Merchants and John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up, while offering decidedly negative images of future, are not truly dystopian because they lack an anti-utopian animus; Zamyatin's We and Huxley's Brave New World, by contrast, serve as paradigms of genre precisely because their negative futures stem specifically from implementation of a rational design for reorganizing society, a utopia. Since most, if not all, such designs for a dirigiste world belong to political left--most, of course, are communal, collectivistic--their anti-type, dystopia, usually is, or at least appears to be, conservative, counseling rather bearing of those ills we have than flying to others that we know not of. Another tradition of utopias, however, depends on revelation rather than on reason, on some divine injunction or leading from above, in which case they are usually theocracies, regimes ruled by a priestly class whose authority rests in will and word of God. Giliad--the futuristic society depicted in The Handmaid's Tale--is Atwood's dystopic projection of such a theocracy, a right-wing, fundamentalist Christian theocracy. Aldous Huxley has argued that whatever its artistic or philosophic qualities, a book about future can interest us only if its prophecies look as though they might conceivably come true. That is to say, conviction or force that such projections convey depends on real-world conditions or, at least, on perception of these conditions; consequently, as these conditions or perceptions change, so will vatic force of fictive projections. Powerful as Nineteen Eighty-Four remains in many ways, its potency as a possible and fearful future significantly declined with decline of old-fashioned jackboot-and-truncheon totalitarianism. With collapse of Evil Empires of Orwell's day, specter of Ingsoc no longer haunts Europe or world. As long ago as 1958, in Brave New World Revisited, Huxley noted that recent developments in Russia . . . have robbed Orwell's book of some of its gruesome verisimilitude and argued, correctly, that the odds were more in favor of something like Brave New World than something like 1984 looming in our future. We have, in other words, little cause to fear a future that does not seem a plausible extrapolation of current conditions. An America, for example, whose super rich convert to Christianity, sell all they have to give to poor, and thus create a crisis in capital accumulation and economic catastrophe is not a scenario that arouses much anxiety. The question, then, that I want to consider is plausibility, in light of current conditions, of future depicted in The Handmaid's Tale. …

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