Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale, published in Canada by McClelland and Stewart in 1985 and in the United States in 1986, is a novel by the Canadian author Margaret Atwood. It is set in the Republic of Gilead, a theocratic dictatorship that has replaced the United States after a coup, in a world of falling birth rates. The narrator, Offred, is a 'handmaid', a woman assigned to a Commander to bear a child for his household. She tells her story in fragments, recalling her former life, in which she had a job, a husband and a daughter.¹

Atwood began the book in West Berlin in 1984, in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, and later worked on it in the United States. She said that nothing in it was invented, because every event in the book has a precedent in history, from the seizing of children to the control of women's dress. Its sources include the Puritans of New England, the rise of the religious right in 1980s America and the Iranian revolution. The title echoes Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and the book ends with a mock academic note from the future.¹²

It won Canada's Governor General's Award in 1985 and the first Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987, and was adapted as a film in 1990, an opera and then, from 2017, a television series. In protests worldwide, women have dressed in the red cloaks and white bonnets of the handmaids. Atwood published a sequel, The Testaments, in 2019, which shared that year's Booker Prize. The book is among the most frequently challenged in American schools yet also one of the most widely taught.¹²³