Adapting Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale and Beyond

Abstract

Palgrave’s Adapting Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale and Beyond provides a timely exploration of Atwood’s work within new and dynamic critical frameworks, addressing how Atwood adapts classical myths and other literary works, the way her work is adapted and—in the interviews that complete the critical collection—the reflections of theatrical directors and cinematographers working with Atwood’s novels. This critical collection engages with themes of narrative, utopia, dystopia, feminism, posthumanism and the body, while simultaneously seeking “to limit any form of totalizing discourse—including [Atwood’s] own” (8). The wide-ranging essays share a common agenda to place Atwood’s work in dialogue with all the adaptations that “link past, present and future and provide sometimes uncomfortable, if not cataclysmic, truths” (5–6). The collection maps Atwood’s work through different historical, theoretical, and stylistic interpretations, addressing with the first five essays why and how “Atwood Adapts” (14). Marta Dvořák offers a critically rich exploration of Hag-Seed (2016) and The Heart Goes Last (2015), addressing “the intertextual playfulness of both texts” (6), while Ruby Niemann engages with The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), The Penelopiad (2006) and Hag-Seed, assessing the three adaptations through the lens of colonization and hauntology. Lena Crucitti uses Dominique Lestel’s definition of the human and Stanley Holling’s concept of resilience to examine the MaddAddam trilogy (2003–13) “as an adaptation of a dystopian [...] plural and monstrous” narrative that “reminds the readers that it is their own monstrosity and fragmentation that have allowed them to survive in the animal kingdom” (60). Nicole Côté, in a similar vein, offers a reading of MaddAddam as an adaptation of Survival, Atwood’s 1972 non-fiction text, in which she “shows Canadian literature evolving from perceiving nature as monstrous to perceiving humans as monstrous towards nature” (63). Côté also examines Atwood’s use of irony and humorous neologisms that uplift a gloomy background and offer hope for the survival of the human race. Penny Farfan’s essay employs a feminist lens to compare The Penelopiad as a theatrical adaptation (2007) and The Handmaid’s Tale as a television adaptation (2017–) and states that The Penelopiad offers a non-cathartic but clear closure, while The Handmaid’s Tale adaptation, which needs to keep on providing popular entertainment, remains open ended.