Let's read & discuss "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood
Details
The Handmaid's Tale is a futuristic dystopian novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood published in 1985. It is set in a near-future New England in a patriarchal, totalitarian theonomic state known as the Republic of Gilead, which has overthrown the United States government. Offred is the central character and narrator and one of the "Handmaids": women who are forcibly assigned to produce children for the "Commanders", who are the ruling class in Gilead.
The novel explores themes of powerless women in a patriarchal society, loss of female agency and individuality, suppression of reproductive rights, and the various means by which women resist and try to gain individuality and independence. The title echoes the component parts of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, which is a series of connected stories (such as "The Merchant's Tale" and "The Parson's Tale"). It also alludes to the tradition of fairy tales where the central character tells her story.
"The Handmaid's Tale" won the 1985 Governor General's Award and the first Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987; it was also nominated for the 1986 Nebula Award, the 1986 Booker Prize, and the 1987 Prometheus Award. In 2022, "The Handmaid's Tale" was included on the "Big Jubilee Read" list of 70 books by Commonwealth authors, selected to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II. The book has been adapted into a 1990 film, a 2000 opera, a 2017 television series, and other media. A sequel novel, The Testaments, was published in 2019.
Fitting with her statements that "The Handmaid's Tale" is a work of speculative fiction, not science fiction, Atwood's novel offers a satirical view of various social, political, and religious trends of early Puritanism in the United States. Atwood notes that "[n]ations never build apparently radical forms of government on foundations that aren’t there already," and further describes the novel's setting as a potential cover story for how someone might seize power in the United States. Such a situation, argues Atwood, would "need only the opportunity of a period of social chaos to reassert itself."