'Just a Backlash': Margaret Atwood, Feminism, and The Handmaid's Tale

Abstract

Margaret Atwood conceived the Republic of Gilead in The Handmaid's Tale as one logical outcome of what she termed the 'strict theocracy' of the 'fundamentalist government' of the United States' Puritan founding fathers. 1 Her Gileadean government maintains its power by means of surveillance, suppression of information, 're-education' centres, and totalitarian violence. Its major national issue, sterility consequent on nuclear and chemical pollution, it addresses through sexual surrogacy, turning its few fertile women into 'Handmaids' to its highest-level Commanders and their wives, using as justification the biblical story in which the barren Rachel directs her husband Jacob to 'go in unto' her servant Billah: 'and she shall bear upon my knees, that I also may have children by her' (epigraph). We learn about Gilead through one of its (self-described) 'two-legged wombs' or 'ambulatory chalices' (128), the Handmaid Offred, who records her story after she has escaped the regime. Caught up in a dystopian state that the novel hypothesizes as the logical extension not only of Puritan government but also of the agenda articulated during the 1980s by America's fundamentalist Christian Right, what Offred knows is that power pervades every aspect of Gileadean life. Power: 'who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death,' 'who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it' (126-27). What Offred also knows is that the temptations of power offer a feminine inflection: 'if you happen to be a man,' she addresses her future reader, 'and you've made it this far, please remember: you will never be subjected to the temptation of feeling you must forgive, a man, as a woman' (126). The novel's outwardly conformist and once independent Offred has seen her social value reduced to repro- duction, and her personal freedom completely curtailed. But the retrospec- tive monologue in which she tells her story reveals her as observant of the