The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.” 

Any book that has ever been banned is almost guaranteed to be a compelling read. Of course, the aim of banning a book is to banish the idea, so the fact that The Handmaid’s Tale (a novel that condemns treating women as wombs) has been banned in America, where abortion is outlawed in 17 states, is sadly unsurprising. 

Published in 1985, The Handmaid's Tale takes place in a strongly patriarchal, totalitarian, theocratic state, known as the Republic of Gilead, which has overthrown the US government. Under this regime, women are enslaved surrogates, imprisoned by an administration that values them only in obedience and fertility, and forces them to bear children for Commanders: Gilead’s ruling class of men. 

I remember flying through this novel in the university library, hibernating from a particularly bitter Bournemouth winter and procrastinating an impending assignment hand-in. As it turned out, this book went on to have an enormous influence on all my submissions thereafter, and quickly solidified itself as my favourite dystopian novel to date. Margaret Atwood has a particular knack for creating dystopian narratives that not only feel plausible, but close in proximity, too. Her talent lies in orchestrating vividly cruel circumstances for her characters to endure, largely due to their intertwinement with the echoes of real human history: 

 “If I was to create an imaginary garden, I wanted the toads in it to be real. One of my rules was that I would not put any events into the book that had not already happened in what James Joyce called the “nightmare” of history, nor any technology not already available. No imaginary gizmos, no imaginary laws, no imaginary atrocities. God is in the details, they say. So is the Devil.” 

I think The Handmaid’s Tale resonates with myself and so many others (just take a look at the handmaid outfits used to protest Trump’s policies in 2020), because it not only envisions a future in which women are stripped of agency, but also because it lays out the exact circumstances that demonstrate how quickly this future could be achieved and maintained, making it an equally immersing yet terrifying reading experience:

“I guess that's how they were able to do it, in the way they did it, all at once, without anyone knowing beforehand. If there had still been portable money, it would have been more difficult.

It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics at the time. I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe, the entire government gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen?

That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on.”

The Handmaid’s Tale is phenomenal in detailing how one might claw for their own autonomy, even without custody of their own name. The story’s narrator is a woman who has been re-named ‘Offred’ (derived from her Commander Fred’s name), which Atwood has recalled took inspiration from the erosion of names and identities that took place within the slave trade as a means of control. This is but one of the many references to real-life events that can be found in the novel. I would argue that it even becomes a more interesting read after you have read it, as it really is one of those books that alters the ways in which you see the world for its ugly history.

As the Trump administration’s advancement in the US 2016 election surged on, so too did a reappearing spike in popularity for The Handmaid’s Tale. In more recent years, the same occurrence unfolded as the legislation of Roe v. Wade was overturned, illegalising abortion in certain, predominantly Republican, American states. As the verdict of Roe v. Wade loomed over American women’s heads and wombs, handmaid cloaks were utilised in symbolic protest, solidifying yet again what a profound impact this novel had. Atwood has since released a limited edition of the novel that is physically un-burnable, intended to serve as a potent symbol against censorship and a reminder of the necessity of protecting not only free speech but freedom itself. 

“Women are not an afterthought of nature; they are not secondary players in human destiny, and every society has always known that. Without women capable of giving birth, human populations would die out. That is why the mass rape and murder of women, girls and children has long been a feature of genocidal wars, and of other campaigns meant to subdue and exploit a population. Kill their babies and replace their babies with yours, as cats do; make women have babies they can’t afford to raise, or babies you will then remove from them for your own purposes, steal babies — it’s been a widespread, age-old motif. The control of women and babies has been a feature of every repressive regime on the planet.” (Margaret Atwood)