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When Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale was released in 1985, it was a work of speculative fiction: In the near future, a puritanical, militarized sect has taken over most of the United States, now known as Gilead. All of Congress has been killed; the Constitution has been suspended. Because of deteriorating fertility and plummeting birth rates — a pandemic of miscarriages and birth deformities have been caused by environmental toxicity, and healthy babies are rare — a new system has been put in place to ensure population growth: Handmaids are women with healthy ovaries who serve powerful, childless couples. They submit to a monthly ritual called the Ceremony, in which a Commander, a member of Gilead's ruling class, tries to impregnate a Handmaid as she lies in his wife's lap. Handmaids are actually in a relative position of privilege compared to other women, who work as house staff, are wives to lowly workers, or are sent to the faraway Colonies to clean up nuclear waste (and die from it).
Hulu was well on its way to making a television adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale when Donald Trump was elected president in November. It was officially announced in April 2016, with Mad Men's Elisabeth Moss as its star, a Handmaid named Offred, and Bruce Miller (ER, The 100) as its TV creator. Yet in the wake of Trump's surprise victory, and as his tumultuous first 100 days as president comes to a close, watching The Handmaid's Tale might feel uncomfortably real.
Regardless of one's political stripe, there's an instability and a chaos these days, and a feeling that anything can happen. Such is the mood of The Handmaid's Tale. There aren't one-to-one comparisons between Trump policies and the show's vision of Gilead, but the book and its imagery have become powerful symbols unto themselves. On Jan. 21, as people marched around the world for women's rights, some held signs that read, "Make Margaret Atwood fiction again," "The Handmaid's Tale is not an instructional manual," and "No to the republic of Gilead." A couple of months later, a group of women dressed as Handmaids — in rich red cloaks and starchy white bonnets — showed up in Texas's state Senate to protest measures that would curb abortion rights.
More than anything, though, The Handmaid's Tale captures today's sense of dread and anxiety about the erosion of rights (among immigrants, people of color, and women in particular); about the environment; about war; about an economic caste system that seems unsustainable; about intolerance of religions that aren't Christianity; and about the increase of freely expressed racism, misogyny, and homophobia that proliferates in American culture.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/kateaurthur/handmaids-tale-my-name-is-june?utm_term=.aj2JaAZQX0#.am50rwXvk3
Hulu was well on its way to making a television adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale when Donald Trump was elected president in November. It was officially announced in April 2016, with Mad Men's Elisabeth Moss as its star, a Handmaid named Offred, and Bruce Miller (ER, The 100) as its TV creator. Yet in the wake of Trump's surprise victory, and as his tumultuous first 100 days as president comes to a close, watching The Handmaid's Tale might feel uncomfortably real.
Regardless of one's political stripe, there's an instability and a chaos these days, and a feeling that anything can happen. Such is the mood of The Handmaid's Tale. There aren't one-to-one comparisons between Trump policies and the show's vision of Gilead, but the book and its imagery have become powerful symbols unto themselves. On Jan. 21, as people marched around the world for women's rights, some held signs that read, "Make Margaret Atwood fiction again," "The Handmaid's Tale is not an instructional manual," and "No to the republic of Gilead." A couple of months later, a group of women dressed as Handmaids — in rich red cloaks and starchy white bonnets — showed up in Texas's state Senate to protest measures that would curb abortion rights.
More than anything, though, The Handmaid's Tale captures today's sense of dread and anxiety about the erosion of rights (among immigrants, people of color, and women in particular); about the environment; about war; about an economic caste system that seems unsustainable; about intolerance of religions that aren't Christianity; and about the increase of freely expressed racism, misogyny, and homophobia that proliferates in American culture.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/kateaurthur/handmaids-tale-my-name-is-june?utm_term=.aj2JaAZQX0#.am50rwXvk3
