handmaids tale context

Context
Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario, on November 18, 1939. She published her
first book of poetry in 1961 while attending the University of Toronto. She later received
degrees from both Radcliffe College and Harvard University, and pursued a career in
teaching at the university level. Her first novel, The Edible Woman, was published in 1969 to
wide acclaim. Atwood continued teaching as her literary career blossomed. She has lectured
widely and has served as a writer-in-residence at colleges ranging from the University of
Toronto to Macquarie University in Australia.
Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale in West Berlin and Alabama in the mid-1980s. The
novel, published in 1986, quickly became a best-seller. The Handmaid’s Tale falls squarely
within the twentieth-century tradition of anti-utopian, or ‘dystopian’ novels, exemplified by
classics like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. Novels in this
genre present imagined worlds and societies that are not ideals, but instead are terrifying or
restrictive.
Atwood’s novel offers a strongly feminist vision of dystopia. She wrote it shortly after the
elections of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain,
during a period of conservative revival in the West partly fuelled by a strong, well-organized
movement of religious conservatives who criticized what they perceived as the excesses of
the ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s and 1970s. The growing power of this ‘religious right’
heightened feminist fears that the gains women had made in previous decades would be
reversed.
In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood explores the consequences of a reversal of women’s rights.
In the novel’s nightmare world of Gilead, a group of conservative religious extremists has
taken power and turned the sexual revolution on its head. Feminists argued for liberation
from traditional gender roles, but Gilead is a society founded on a “return to traditional
values” and gender roles, and on the subjugation of women by men.
What feminists considered the great triumphs of the 1970s – namely, widespread access to
contraception, the legalization of abortion, and the increasing political influence of female
voters – have all been undone. Women in Gilead are not only forbidden to vote, they are
forbidden to read or write. Atwood’s novel also paints a picture of a world undone by
pollution and infertility, reflecting 1980s fears about declining birthrates, the dangers of
nuclear power, and environmental degradation.
Some of the novel’s concerns seem dated today, and its implicit condemnation of the
political goals of America’s religious conservatives has been criticized as unfair and overly
paranoid. Nonetheless, The Handmaid’s Tale remains one of the most powerful recent
portrayals of a totalitarian society, and one of the few dystopian novels to examine in detail
the intersection of politics and sexuality. The novel’s exploration of the controversial politics
of reproduction seems likely to guarantee Atwood’s novel a readership well into the twentyfirst
century