Title: The Politics of The Handmaid's Tale

In Canada, they said, 'Could it happen here?' In England, they said, 'jolly good yam.' In the United States, they said, 'How long have we got?' Such were the 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 the calmest, viewing the work, that is, purely as fantasy, like Alice in Wonderland or Lord of the Rings . Canadians feel, apparently, some modest degree of apprehension. But it is in America, where the 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, the 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 the socio-political conditions of the day. I want to cast a critical eye on the putatively American way of responding to Atwood's tale. Read seriously (in contrast to pure fantasy), the book belongs to the genre called the dystopia, a genre that projects an imaginary society that differs from the 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 the 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 the genre precisely because their negative futures stem specifically from the implementation of a rational design for reorganizing society, a utopia. Since most, if not all, such designs for a dirigiste world belong to the political left--most, of course, are communal, collectivistic--their anti-type, the dystopia, usually is, or at least appears to be, conservative, counseling rather the 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 the 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.

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