Abstract
AbstractThis article analyzes the changes inThe Handmaid’s Tale’s moral and political outlook as it tracks different forms of complexity in the novel, the film, and the TV series. While the sense of female empowerment increases with each adaptation of this tale of forced sexual servitude in fictional theocratic state of Gilead, the essay argues that Hulu’s TV series (created by Bruce Miller, 2017–) develops an intriguing interaction between the interiority of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel and the exteriority emphasized in Volker Schlöndorff’s 1990 film. In so doing, the TV series Escher-twists across related binaries between activity/passivity and personal/political actions as well. By expanding, displacing, and creatively intersecting storylines which the novel cut short, the series weaves an intricate perspectival web that invites the viewer to participate in its mind games.
Highlights
When the US publishers Doubleday and Anchor Books acquired the rights to The Testaments (2019) – Margaret Atwood’s sequel to her 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale – they announced that the latter had become “a symbol of the movement against” Donald Trump, “standing for female empowerment and resistance in the face of misogyny and the rolling back of women’s rights around the world.”1
Already in the 1990 film adaptation by celebrated auteur-filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff and veteran playwright and screenwriter Harold Pinter, the protagonist gains a sense of personal and political agency unimaginable from the perspective of the novel, especially when she ends up slaying her Commander and escaping her state of subjection
This season subsequently centers on June’s efforts to convince Serena that Gilead is no place for “her” baby girl to grow up. This results in Serena’s complicity in baby Nichole’s deliverance to Canada, which is another act of passivity and of personal revenge, this time on part of Serena against her husband’s subjection of her. It takes yet another season for baby Nichole to become a symbol of Gilead’s political power and for her mother to become a symbol of the resistance against it
Summary
When the US publishers Doubleday and Anchor Books acquired the rights to The Testaments (2019) – Margaret Atwood’s sequel to her 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale – they announced that the latter had become “a symbol of the movement against” Donald Trump, “standing for female empowerment and resistance in the face of misogyny and the rolling back of women’s rights around the world.”. To the extent that the novel tells the tale of (and by) a traumatized Handmaid who is kept in the dark about the society she serves, it is aptly conveyed through its episodic form and its restricted first-person narration, with chapters whose spatiotemporal coordinates can be hard to pin down Through this form, the likewise disorienting reading experience remains caught up to the point of claustrophobia in the limited perspective of the Handmaid. While the show enhances the sense of female empowerment and resistance referenced in the acquisition statement; it more pertinently perhaps, invites the audience to navigate the boundaries between interiority and exteriority, and, by extension, on those between passivity/activity, individuality/collectivity, and the personal/political, and to do so on a case-by-case basis Before assessing this specific form of televisual complexity through an extensive analysis of the first season’s final episode, I will discuss the 1985 novel and the 1990 film in more detail
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