Keywords
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaids Tale, Christian nationalism, biopolitics, dystopia, book bannings
Abstract
When Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985, she didn’t think it’d still be relevant nearly forty years later. Yet, her use of historical imagination helped her create a novel that permeates time and space. This essay explores the production and reception of The Handmaid’s Tale, asking how the novel was both a product of the political and cultural context of its production in the 1980s and a critique of Atwood’s own contemporary moment. Atwood drew on biblical themes, Puritan history, and the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu to construct Gilead's social and political order and comment on American and international politics of the 1980s. In both drawing on the past and commenting on the present, Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale reflected a key characteristic of the dystopian genre while also subverting and challenging the genre. Despite being published nearly forty years ago, the author and readers alike have continued to point to the novel in their efforts to raise awareness of reproductive issues and assert women's autonomy against a misogynistic state. Additionally, Atwood’s utilization of historical imagination enables us to think differently about history, not as something that both started and ended in the past, but as something current, omnipresent, and complex.
Recommended Citation
Deale, Celeste (2025) "When Dystopia Becomes Political Criticism: Why Margaret Atwood Wrote The Handmaid's Tale," Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal: 6 (1), 5-35. https://works.swarthmore.edu/suhj/vol6/iss1/1
Included in
American Literature Commons, American Popular Culture Commons, Intellectual History Commons, Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Political History Commons, United States History Commons