The Handmaid's Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood

 

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Review

Set in late twentieth-century New England, a few years after a civil war and the establishment of the Republic of Gilead, The Handmaid’s Tale explores life under a religiously conservative, totalitarian patriarchy in which declining fertility rates have made reproduction a central instrument of state control. Although Margaret Atwood has argued that the novel belongs to speculative fiction rather than science fiction, The Handmaid’s Tale won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction Novel in 1987 and received nominations for both the Locus and Nebula Awards.

Presented as a first-person account by Offred, recovered and studied by historians long after the events it describes, the novel follows a woman forcibly assigned to a ruling-class household for the sole purpose of bearing a child. One of the few remaining fertile women, Offred belongs to a class known as Handmaids, who are transferred between the households of Commanders. This is her third assignment. Like all Handmaids, her name is derived from that of the man to whom she belongs.

The narrative unfolds through a series of mysteries, gradually illuminated through Offred’s fragmented recollections and observations, some remaining unresolved until the historical commentary that closes the novel. She understands that her previous marriage rendered her vulnerable under Gilead’s newly imposed religious laws, but she does not know what has become of her husband, mother or daughter. The events surrounding the collapse of American democracy remain similarly obscure. Doctors carry firearms, public executions are commonplace and ordinary institutions have been transformed beyond recognition, yet Atwood rarely offers explicit explanations. As in Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun (1980–1983), the reader must become a forensic investigator, reconstructing the nature of an unfamiliar society from fragments of information.

The totalitarian character of Gilead is perhaps most immediately apparent in the elaborate dress codes imposed upon women. Commanders’ Wives wear blue, Handmaids red with large white bonnets, Aunts, who oversee the indoctrination of Handmaids, brown, Econowives the multicoloured stripes of their combined domestic roles, and Marthas green. Young girls wear pink, boys blue and widows black. Clothing functions as a visible system of classification, fixing each individual within a rigid hierarchy of gender, reproduction and social status.

Alongside detailed descriptions of food rationing and domestic routines, Atwood creates an atmosphere combining post-war austerity, the gender conventions of the 1950s and the religious conservatism associated with traditionalist communities. Even familiar materials such as plastics have begun disappearing from everyday life. Atwood has described the novel as a response to the cultural and political conflicts of the 1980s, imagining the consequences of an authoritarian religious movement gaining control of the state.

However extreme Gilead’s institutions may appear, Atwood grounds their emergence in recognisable social anxieties. Environmental pollution, toxic chemicals, radiation and sexually transmitted disease have contributed to a reproductive crisis. Fertility rates have collapsed, while birth defects and unsuccessful pregnancies have become increasingly common. Against this background of demographic uncertainty, religious fundamentalism finds fertile ground, offering moral explanations for what is fundamentally a biological and environmental catastrophe.

The regime turns reproductive failure into an instrument of ideological control. Women are stripped of their rights, their identities subordinated to their biological functions. Those deemed socially or reproductively undesirable risk being classified as Unwomen and sent to the Colonies. Reading is forbidden to women, and books, magazines, films and other forms of cultural expression fall under strict censorship. Doctors who have performed abortions, religious dissenters and homosexuals become targets of persecution, their executions transformed into public spectacles intended to reinforce obedience.

Yet the most compelling expression of Gilead’s totalitarianism lies not in its spectacular acts of repression but in the painstaking depiction of Offred’s everyday existence. Her memories of university life, personal independence and ordinary intimacy contrast painfully with a present in which she has been deprived of almost every meaningful choice. The regimented routines of the Commander’s household reveal the full extent of her lost freedom, recalling the oppressive banality of institutional life in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962).

Offred invests the smallest permitted pleasures with almost ritual significance. Her existence is defined as much by what has been taken from her, including privacy, companionship and the simplest forms of human touch, as by the violence and humiliation she experiences. The Commander’s Wife, the household staff and the men who administer the regime are themselves caught within a system of resentment, suspicion and compromised relationships. Even those who exercise authority are constrained by the ideological machinery they help sustain.

Atwood’s achievement lies in demonstrating how totalitarian power extends far beyond the institutions of government. It enters the household, regulates intimacy, reshapes language and colonises the smallest gestures of everyday life. The violence of Gilead is systemic, sustained not only through coercion but through the gradual destruction of personal autonomy and the relationships that make resistance possible.

The Handmaid’s Tale is therefore more than a dystopian warning about religious authoritarianism or reproductive control. It is an investigation into the mechanisms through which a society can normalise the unthinkable, transforming exceptional measures into the routines of ordinary existence. By filtering this transformation through Offred’s fragmented memories and intimate observations, Atwood makes the erosion of freedom both politically recognisable and profoundly personal.