The Handmaid’s Tale: Negative Utopia as Polemic

The Handmaid’s Tale, like most negative utopian literature, is more interesting as social critique than gripping as narrative.

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale unabashedly places itself in the negative utopian tradition, and may actually herald the beginning of a new genre: the feminist negative utopia (dystopia).

Atwood’s novel depicts a not too futuristic society of Gilead, a society that overthrows the U.S. Government and institutes a totalitarian regime that seems to persecute women specifically. Apparently concerned by falling (Caucasian) birthrates, caused in part by a sterility virus, the Gilead regime reduces some women, the handmaids, to a purely procreational function. They are assigned to Commanders, who undergo a regular procreational ceremony with the handmaids, with the wife not only present, but lying directly under the handmaid to create the illusion that she is to be the impregnated vessel. This helps maintain the appearance of the sanctity of marriage, one of many Judeo-Christian dogmas that the Gilead regime fiercely upholds.

Although Atwood takes many shots at the beliefs of the Gilead regime, based as they are on a kind of neo-Old Testament view of women’s role in society, her critique is given through the eyes of one handmaid, Offred. Offred is in her early thirties, and like 1984‘s Winston Smith, can remember “the time before.” Her story is told in several narrative threads, which overlap by association. Thus, the “present tense” of her tale, concerns…