Title: The Handmaid's Tale Author: Margaret Atwood Creation Date: 1985 Location: Canada Collection: Women Who Wrote When They Weren't Supposed To
Brief
Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid's Tale in 1985, having drafted most of it in West Berlin during 1984. She was forty-four, already established through Surfacing and Life Before Man, and watching where American politics seemed to be heading — the Moral Majority, Reagan's second term, the Iranian Revolution, and Ceauşescu's Romania enforcing compulsory childbearing through Decree 770. Atwood imposed a strict rule: nothing would go into the book that had not already happened somewhere in recorded history. No speculative invention. Only recombination.
The result reads like science fiction but functions as an archive. Gilead — the theocratic state occupying the former northeastern United States — is assembled from Puritan New England, the Lebensborn programmes of Nazi Germany, the Salem witch trials, Romanian reproductive surveillance, revolutionary Iran's dress codes, nineteenth-century American slave law, and the Rachel-and-Bilhah passage from Genesis. The narrator is Offred — "of Fred," her Commander's patronymic, stamped on her by a state that has cancelled her real name, bank account, job, marriage, and daughter.
Offred's testimony — reconstructed from cassette tapes found in a wall in Bangor, Maine — is framed by a scholarly apparatus set in 2195 at the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies, where Professor Pieixoto presents his findings to an audience that laughs at his mild jokes. This "Historical Notes" device is Atwood's most important formal choice: it guarantees Gilead is in the past, and the only remaining question is how and when. Atwood returned with The Testaments (2019), winner of the Booker Prize.
The Prohibition
The prohibitions of Gilead are catalogued with bureaucratic precision, every one with a real-world citation. Women cannot hold jobs, own property, read, or write. Bank accounts are frozen on the day of the coup. The population is divided into colour-coded castes: Wives in blue, Handmaids in red, Marthas in green, Aunts in brown, Econowives in stripes, Unwomen worked to death cleaning the Colonies. Fertile women outside Gilead's marital categories are reclassified as Handmaids, required by theological law to participate in a monthly ceremony modelled on Genesis 30: "Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her."
Atwood has listed the precedents in the 1986 essay "Writing The Handmaid's Tale", the 2017 reissue introduction, and Burning Questions. The Iranian Revolution gave her female professionals in Tehran losing jobs and legal adulthood inside a single year. Ceauşescu's Decree 770 (1966–1989) banned contraception and abortion, imposed monthly gynaecological examinations, and produced the vast orphanage population that shocked the world in 1990. American Puritanism — the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Salem trials, her ancestor Mary Webster (hanged and survived, 1685) — supplied the ideological architecture. The Moral Majority gave the novel its contemporary urgency.
Any reader wanting to dismiss Gilead as fantasy had to confront a list of states that had, in living memory, done each specific thing. "Nothing went into it that had not already happened." The book's power depends on that rule being true.
The Strategy
Atwood's strategy was to refuse both realism and the science-fiction label. She chose speculative fiction — fiction about things that could actually happen — because she needed to compress multiple historical horrors into a single jurisdiction without the obligations of documentary journalism. A straight novel about evangelical America in 1984 would have been dismissed as hysterical; a documentary about Romania or Iran would not have reached the readers she needed. A speculative near-future in the American landscape let her historicise the present.
The circumstances mattered. In 1984 she was in West Berlin on a DAAD fellowship, near the Wall. Trips into East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Poland supplied direct material. Crossing into a surveillance state — notebook searched, hotel room possibly bugged, observing people who had learned to live with informers — fed into Offred's daily texture. The silence of handmaids walking in pairs, the coded exchanges, the internal theatre of a person who cannot trust her own mouth: reportage from the Eastern Bloc in red robes.
The key move was the Historical Notes epilogue. Without it, the novel ends on Offred entering a black van, fate suspended. With it, the narrative is reframed as a recovered archival document transcribed by male academics in the twenty-second century. Professor Pieixoto delivers his keynote with the breezy self-satisfaction of a man for whom Gilead is a completed research topic. It confirms Gilead has fallen and shows the fall produced another male interpretive framework for a woman's testimony. The epilogue enforces Atwood's core claim.
The Price and the Legacy
The price Atwood paid was a four-decade argument with censors and school boards. The Handmaid's Tale has appeared on the American Library Association's most-challenged books list almost continuously since the early 1990s, removed from curricula in Texas, Kansas, Alabama, Oregon, and Ontario, and the subject of formal complaints in more than a hundred US school districts. The irony of a novel about the prohibition of women's reading being prohibited for women's reading is one the challengers construct for her.
The legacy has three strands. The first is literary: the novel became the reference work for English-language dystopian fiction by and about women, opening a lane for Octavia Butler, Naomi Alderman, and later writers. Shortlisted for the Booker in 1986, it won the Governor General's Award in Canada and the first Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987, and has remained in print in forty languages. The second is adaptational: Volker Schlöndorff's 1990 film was modest; the Hulu series premiering in April 2017 won the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series in its first year.
The third strand is political. From 2017, women protesting reproductive-rights legislation in the United States, Ireland, Argentina, and Poland began arriving at legislatures in red robes and bonnets. The image appeared at the Kavanaugh hearings in 2018, the Polish protests in 2020, and the Dobbs demonstrations in 2022. Atwood published The Testaments in 2019 and won the Booker jointly with Bernardine Evaristo: the book catalogues things that have already happened, and whether they happen again depends on the reader.
The Reading
The narrator does not tell us her real name. She is Offred now — "of Fred," the patronymic that Gilead assigns to all handmaids, marking them as property of their assigned Commanders, strippable and reassignable whenever the household is reshuffled. She belongs at present to Commander Fred Waterford and his wife Serena Joy Waterford, who was once Pam — a televangelist and gospel singer who preached the sanctity of the home and the return of women to their proper sphere and who now inhabits the prison that her own advocacy helped to build. In the Republic of Gilead — formerly the northeastern United States, conquered in a coup whose details we learn only in fragments — fertile women who do not conform to Gilead's marital categories have been reclassified as Handmaids: reproductive vessels assigned to high-ranking households and required by theological and demographic law to participate in "the Ceremony", a monthly ritual of regulated intercourse with the Commander while lying on her back between the Wife's open legs, her head pillowed on the Wife's stomach, the whole arrangement drawn directly from the passage in Genesis where Rachel gives her maid Bilhah to Jacob. Gilead has a plummeting birthrate, a poisoned landscape choked with pollutants and radiation, and a class of women called Unwomen who are being worked to death cleaning up the Colonies. Offred's value to the state is her ovaries.
The novel's opening finds her in the Commander's house in what used to be Cambridge, Massachusetts. She sleeps in a bare room with a window that has had its glass replaced with something shatter-proof and a ceiling fixture from which the light has been removed — because a previous handmaid in this room, an earlier Offred, hanged herself from it. Her days are structured by prohibition. She walks to the market, called Loaves and Fishes, with her shopping partner Ofglen, whom she does not yet know to be a member of the Mayday underground. They shop using picture tokens because women cannot read the labels. They pass the Wall, where the bodies of executed doctors and priests and homosexuals and women who have tried to escape hang under white hoods. They pass Guardians, who are young men not yet promoted to Angels, and Eyes, who are secret police. They exchange the prescribed phrases: Blessed be the fruit. May the Lord open.
In between these walks, Offred remembers. The memories come in waves, unbidden and exact — her mother, a second-wave feminist who once took her to a book burning of pornographic magazines and who has since disappeared into the Colonies; her best friend Moira, who was arrested at college and brought to the Red Center, a re-education facility run by the Aunts, where both of them were trained in the theological and practical requirements of handmaid life under the cattle-prod pedagogy of Aunt Lydia; her husband Luke, with whom she had tried to flee to Canada on forged passports when the regime began its transition from coup to consolidation; her daughter, who was five years old when they were caught at the border, and who was taken from her in the snow and given to another family; her job at a library, from which she was fired when the law changed on a single day and all women were dismissed from their positions and all women's bank accounts were frozen and transferred to their male next-of-kin. She remembers trying to buy cigarettes with a card that had suddenly been invalidated. She remembers calling Luke and Luke saying, it's going to be all right, honey, and not meaning it. She remembers the feel of ordinary time, which she is now learning was not ordinary at all but precious and unrepeatable.
The Red Center sequences are Offred's training ground and the novel's lesson in how a totalitarian system manufactures consent. Aunt Lydia, in her brown uniform with her cattle prod and her quotations from scripture, teaches the new handmaids that Gilead is a gift to women: freedom from the predatory marketplace of the old world, freedom from rape and pornography and career pressure, freedom from having to be anything other than a vessel for the next generation. "There is more than one kind of freedom", Aunt Lydia says. "Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it." The handmaids are made to take turns telling their rape stories and then to chant in unison that they were responsible — that they led men on, that they were asking for it, that it was their own fault. Janine, a pathologically malleable woman in Offred's cohort, accepts the chant completely and becomes Aunt Lydia's favourite, which does not save her from later being reassigned and broken. Moira escapes twice from the Red Center, the first time failing and being tortured, the second time by taking an Aunt hostage, stealing her uniform, and walking out the front gate.
In the Waterford household, the Ceremony takes place once a month on the appointed day. Serena Joy sits in a chair with Offred lying between her legs. The Commander, fully clothed, reads from the Bible — the passage about Rachel and Bilhah, always that passage — and then does what is required, efficiently and without affection, while his Wife grips Offred's hands so hard that the fingers bruise. The act has been stripped of every element that might make it resemble sex. It is a state function, like jury duty or census returns. Offred narrates it in a tone so flat that the effect is worse than anger. When it is finished the Commander leaves and Offred is required to lie still for ten minutes to maximise her chances of conception. Serena Joy orders her out of the room as soon as the ten minutes are up.
Then the Commander breaks the rules. He has his driver summon Offred to his private study at night, against every protocol, for the purpose — it emerges after several visits — of playing Scrabble. Handmaids are not allowed to read. Scrabble is the most forbidden thing he can think of that will not get either of them executed. He gives her hand lotion, an old magazine from the previous era, back issues of Vogue. He wants her to kiss him goodnight as if she means it. He is bored and lonely and exercising power in the only direction available to him, and Atwood's portrait of him is precise: he is not a monster, which is the problem, because the system is made of ordinary men doing ordinary small kindnesses to the women they have enslaved and then flattering themselves that they are different from the system. He eventually takes Offred to Jezebel's — the state-tolerated underground brothel where Commanders entertain themselves with the women Gilead publicly condemns, staffed by former lawyers and academics and journalists who chose the club over the Colonies. He is proud of how much he thinks she is enjoying the outing. Offred, dressed in a sequinned leftover from before, goes along with it because Nick is waiting in the kitchen and Jezebel's is a chance to see Moira.
Moira is at Jezebel's. Her second escape ended there. She tells Offred the story in the lavatory, flatly, without self-pity, and says she prefers it to the Colonies because at least the booze is real. Offred wants her to be defiant and unbroken, and Moira refuses the favour. "I don't want her to be like me", Offred thinks. "Give in, go along, save her skin. That is what it comes down to. I want gallantry from her, swashbuckling, heroism, single-handed combat. Something I lack." It is the last Offred sees of her.
Nick is the Commander's driver — a young man whose loyalties are illegible to Offred and therefore to the reader. Their affair begins at Serena Joy's instigation: the Wife, desperate for a pregnancy that she has correctly guessed her husband cannot produce, arranges for Offred to sleep with Nick in secret, on the understanding that the resulting child will be passed off as the Commander's. What Serena Joy arranges as a transaction quickly becomes something else. Offred and Nick begin meeting at night in his apartment over the garage, of their own accord, and Offred allows herself to care about what happens to her in a way she had stopped allowing since the border. She loves him, or something she calls love, which may be need, which may be the same thing; she knows she cannot tell what he actually is — Guardian, Eye, Mayday member, opportunist — and in a condition of total surveillance and total constraint she no longer requires herself to know. Desire has become the one remaining act of self-possession.
Ofglen, meanwhile, has been talking to her. Their coded exchanges on the market walks graduate, very slowly, into something like conversation, and Offred learns that Ofglen is Mayday — part of an underground network that is smuggling handmaids out to Canada through a chain of safe houses. Offred is offered contact. She hesitates, from cowardice and from fear and from the small secret hoard of comfort she has accumulated through her nights with Nick and her Scrabble games with the Commander and her proximity to Serena Joy's garden. Before she can decide, Ofglen vanishes. A new Ofglen appears, who gives the correct responses on the walk, and then, at a corner where no one can hear them, whispers: she hanged herself when she saw the black van. She saw them coming.
The end arrives the same day. Serena Joy has found the sequinned dress and the lipstick in Offred's cloak. She confronts her in the hall, quietly, with the lethal courtesy of a woman whose world has already ended and who now has the consolation of destroying one more thing. "You could have left me something", she says. Offred returns to her room to wait. She expects the Aunts or the Eyes. What arrives is a black van; Nick is at the door; Nick tells her it is Mayday, and that she should go with them, trust him. Offred does not know if she is being rescued or arrested. She steps into the van. The door closes. The narrative stops there.
And then the Historical Notes begin. The year is 2195. The place is the University of Denay, Nunavit, somewhere in the Canadian Arctic, at the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies. Professor James Darcy Pieixoto of Cambridge University is delivering the keynote — "Problems of Authentication in Reference to The Handmaid's Tale" — and he explains, in the relaxed collegial register of an academic among friends, that he and his colleague Professor Knotly Wade have recovered a set of approximately thirty cassette tapes from a metal army-issue footlocker sealed into the wall of a house in what used to be Bangor, Maine. The tapes contain the voice of an unknown woman speaking at intervals, not in order, onto music cassettes (Elvis, Mantovani, Twisted Sister) that were hoarded from before. Pieixoto and Wade have transcribed them and constructed the most plausible sequence. They cannot verify the narrator's identity. They believe her Commander was probably either Frederick R. Waterford or B. Frederick Judd, both senior figures in the early Gileadean government. They think she may have escaped to Canada with Mayday's help, but they have no record of what happened to her after the van. The tape trail ends in the van.
Pieixoto makes a mild joke about the pun in the title — tale, tail, a Chaucerian echo — and the audience laughs. He warns his colleagues against the temptation to judge the Gileadean regime by the moral standards of their own time; cultures must be understood in their context; we should be cautious in applying moral categories to the vanished past. He thanks his colleague, fields a question, accepts the applause, and the novel ends with his closing line: "Are there any questions?" There are none recorded. The woman on the tapes has the last word, in that the tapes exist, but Pieixoto has the last word in that his voice closes the book, and Atwood's irony is perfectly tuned: the surviving record of a woman's life inside a totalitarian theocracy is now being processed by a male academic who, in the gentlest and most professional way, is doing a softer version of exactly what Gilead did to her in the first place — subordinating her experience to an interpretive framework that serves his own career. Gilead has fallen, which is a relief; the world that replaced it has its own forms of polite erasure, which is not. The reader closes the book knowing that Offred's tapes have been recovered and that she has been saved for the record but not necessarily for herself, and that the only certain thing about her ultimate fate is that two men in 2195 are now its curators.
This post is part of Women Who Wrote When They Weren't Supposed To, a series on women writing against the constraints of their time. See the full collection →
The Anchor Books paperback is the standard North American reading text — in print since the late 1990s and the copy most readers will encounter in classrooms, libraries, and bookshops. Atwood's 2017 introduction, included in recent printings, walks through the real-world sources Gilead was assembled from.
Anchor Books paperback, the standard North American edition, with Atwood's later introduction on the novel's real-world sources.
Disclaimer: some links in this post are affiliate links. If you buy through them, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.