In an interview for The Progressive, Margaret Atwood explains how she came to write The Handmaid’s Tale, which is often labeled speculative fiction because it appears to predict or warn of a triumph of totalitarianism or what one reviewer calls a “Western Hemisphere Iran.” Having absorbed the New England Puritan tradition during her studies at Harvard, she observed the rise of the U.S. political right in the 1980s and compared the Moral Majority’s grass-roots menace to the phenomenon of Hitler. According to Atwood, the Nazi leader told the world what he intended to do; then he set about accomplishing his heinous aims. The ranting diatribes of late twentieth-century American right-wingers—who steadfastly push women back into the traditional roles common in the 1950s, delight in the AIDS epidemic among homosexuals, and threaten death to members of the gay culture—parallel Hitler’s fascist candor. Atwood claims to have acted on a what-if scenario: suppose ultraconservatives did achieve a coup d’etat and turned rhetoric into a stringent authoritarianism, replete with suspension of constitutional rights, racial cleansing, torture, perpetual sectarian wars, public execution of homosexuals and dissidents, a repressive police and spy operation, and assignment of roles to women based on their childbearing capabilities.
So trenchant and compelling is Atwood’s fictional premise that critics were bound to clash in their individual responses and interpretations. During the months following publication of the novel and a parallel period after the release of the film version, a variety of voices filled columns and reviews with their responses:
· Barbara Holliday, writing for the Detroit Free Press, granted the novel the adulation due a “brilliant and Machiavellian” thriller, but noted plot shortcuts, particularly the President’s Day massacre of the U.S. president and the Congress, who are machine-gunned in one neat guerrilla attack. Holliday labels this unlikely scenario “a coup in a Banana Republic.”
· Doris Grumbach, reviewing for the Chicago Tribune, strikes to the heart of Atwood’s purpose—shocking the audience with her dystopian view, which is “gripping in its horrendous details, striking in the extensions Atwood makes from what is true now of our society to what might possibly be true in time to come.”
· From a strictly literary perspective, John S. Nelson, writing for the Wichita, Kansas, Eagle-Beacon, pegs The Handmaid’s Tale as a “cross between 1984 and The Scarlet Letter,” an oft-repeated duo of comparatives that draw on themes of religious authoritarianism, repression, indoctrination, treachery, and victimization of women.
· A pointed complaint of Robert I. Davis’ review for the Greenburg, Pennsylvania, Tribune is the limited development of characters, both male and female. Other critics lament that the Commander and Nick receive so little fleshing out, particularly during the evening at Jezebel’s and on the evening of Offred’s arrest.
· Elliot Krieger, book editor for the Providence, Rhode Island, Journal, brings Atwood up short for misinterpreting American devotion to free thought and speech. In what Krieger refers to as Atwood’s ludicrous overestimation of ultra-right clout, Americans appear to roll over and play dead, demonstrating an unreal tendency to be “sheepish, malleable, easily duped.” Krieger concludes that Atwood intends not so much to warn as to ponder the ramifications of the “so-called return to traditional values.”
· Alix Madrigal, a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, who interviewed Atwood during her visit to the newspaper’s office, claims that the fictional regime in Gilead lacks cohesion because its Christians and its revolutionaries express too little fervor, too little devotion to God or leaders. He concludes: “With no unifying vision, the center doesn’t hold.”
· Paul Skenazy, a literature teacher reviewing for the San Jose, California, Mercury News, lauds Atwood, but criticizes the novel’s ending—the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies set at the University of Denay, Nunavit, on June 25, 2195—as “inept.” He says, “It is Atwood at her cutest and most unappealing, a jarring piece of narrative silliness that adds little one could not already guess.”
· More laudatory is Cathy Warren, an author reviewing for the Charlotte, North Carolina, Observer, who depicts Atwood’s work as “the cry of a female Jeremiah. . . . The Handmaid’s Tale is not a feminist novel; it is a political one in the Orwell tradition. It is a savage and gripping book, the kind you wish you could put aside but can’t.”
Atwood herself feared that readers would label her paranoid, but out of alarm at the growing power of anti-abortion terrorism and repressive, anti-female religio-political groups, she continued collecting ominous news clippings from the United States, Romania, Russia, Iran, and South Africa to use during the writing of The Handmaid’s Tale. She noted: “I sometimes wake up in the night with disturbing thoughts. . . . What if this book is not a warning, but a forecast?” North American parallels to her thoughts were revealing: Canadian readers worried that such a reactionary cabal might form; U.S. readers shuddered in dread that a right-wing dictatorship was not a matter of if but when.
