Margaret Atwood
This year marks the 25th anniversary of Margaret Atwood’s landmark science fiction novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. Winner of numerous awards, including the 1986 Booker Prize, the novel imagines an alternative America of the near future. Set in the Republic of Gilead, where pollution has sterilized most of the female population, a class struggle arises for the ownership and dominion over women who remain fertile. The protagonist, Kate, is captured while attempting to cross the border into Canada with her family. As she is unaffected by pollutants, she is separated from her husband and daughter, and becomes an enforced surrogate mother for another family. Her name is changed to Offred and she becomes a Handmaid, a mutated functionary of Old Testament values, expected to provide children for a Commander and his wife.Atwood’s dark reflections on gender roles and sexual politics are often read as a satirical snapshot of the 1980s American landscape, and the novel has since become a central text in the classroom. In 1990, her dystopian vision found its way onto the silver screen, starring Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall. We might even see some trace of the book’s influence on contemporary Hollywood today, in dystopic science fiction enterprises like Children of Men (2006). The themes of the novel, which run from ecological catastrophe, to human rights, to religious fundamentalism, are perhaps more relevant now than ever, and have assumed a new kind of political urgency. The Handmaid’s Tale is a cautionary book. In a tradition that includes Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Margaret Atwood’s warning of the future is perhaps just as much a warning for the present.
