Margaret Atwood insisted almost nothing in The Handmaid's Tale was invented
Margaret Atwood carried newspaper clippings to interviews about The Handmaid's Tale to prove a point: nearly everything in her 1985 dystopia had already happened somewhere. Its Republic of Gilead borrows from Puritan New England, Ceaușescu's Romania and revolutionary Iran, and its enslaved Handmaids wear red with white bonnets.
In the novel a radical movement called the Sons of Jacob kills the president and most of Congress and turns the United States into a military theocracy. Women lose the right to read, own property or control reproduction, and colour-coded clothing marks their rank: blue for Commanders' wives, white for daughters, red for Handmaids. The narrator, caught fleeing to Canada with her husband and young daughter, is forced into service bearing children for a Commander. Her name, Offred, simply means belonging to Fred and changes whenever she is moved to another house.
Atwood called the book speculative fiction rather than science fiction. At Harvard on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship she had studied early American Puritanism, and she rejects the idea that the Puritans sought religious tolerance, arguing they wanted a single enforced faith. She dedicated the novel to her ancestor Mary Webster, who was accused of witchcraft in New England and survived being hanged. Iran's 1978–79 revolution, with its strict dress code for women, gets a nod in a fictional history book cited in the epilogue, and Romania's Decree 770, which banned birth control to raise the birth rate, shaped Gilead's policing of pregnancy. She also drew on her own 1950s childhood, when women who had worked during the war were pushed back into the home.
The title echoes the linked stories of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The book closes with a surprising twist: a transcript from an academic conference in 2195, where a male historian explains that Offred's story survived on audio cassettes and muses over whether it can be authenticated.
It won Canada's Governor General's Award in 1985 and the first Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Adaptations include a 1990 film, a 2000 opera and a 2017 television series, and Atwood published a sequel, The Testaments, in 2019.
Source: The Handmaid's Tale
