“Not an instruction manual”: Environmental degradation, racial erasure, and the politics of abortion in The Handmaid's Tale (1985)

Abstract

The Handmaid's Tale (1985), by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, features a reproductive dystopia called the Republic of Gilead that is set in a near-futuristic USA. However compelling, the association of the novel with the politics of abortion in the era of President Donald J. Trump has sidelined its temporal origins in the first term of Ronald Reagan's presidency and overshadowed the plot's hinge: a fertility decline triggered mainly by a series of ecological crises leads to the founding of the Republic of Gilead as a white supremacist, patriarchal, evangelical Christian, theocratic stronghold bent on improving the white birth rate. This backdrop is indebted to Atwood's own longstanding ecofeminist philosophy, which means that the novel is as much about Reagan-era abortion politics as it is about concerns over environmental degradation in the early 1980s. Approaching the novel along these parallel tracks provides ample opportunity to spotlight its real-life historical context, using it as a springboard to examine the plot's racial implications and the knock-on emergence of movements for environmental justice and reproductive justice, coming full circle to the Trump era.