As Atwood reveals through her essays and interviews, The Handmaid’s Tale is an outgrowth of the twentieth-century dystopian point of view. Unlike pre-twentieth-century dreamers, altruists, and sectarians—such as Bronson Alcott, Robert Owens, Henry David Thoreau, Mother Ann Lee, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, Mary Baker Eddy, and Charles Fourier, who created perfect worlds on paper and launched experimental utopias (for example, Brooke Farm, Pennsylvania Dutch enclaves, Christian Scientists’ Massachusetts Metaphysical College and Pleasant View Home, the pioneer beginnings of Salt Lake City, Utah, and the New Harmony and Oneida communes)—dystopian writers countered unbridled idealism with a worst-case perspective. George Orwell, master of the genre, wrote 1984 (1949), a nightmare novel set in London under a totalitarian regime where manipulative rewriters of history change facts to suit political exigency, manipulate language to serve the truth of the moment, and suborn party menials with threats, coercion, and subtle terrors. Orwell’s brief beast fable, Animal Farm (1945), presents a similar controlled misery in miniature as the disgruntled animals on an English farm revolt and evolve a fascist pig-run police state, which is far worse than their former servitude to the human farmer.
Other anti-utopian classics from the twentieth century exhibit the doubts, fears, and discontent of notable dystopists: Ayn Rand (Anthem), Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange), Karel Capek (R.U.R.), and Ray Bradbury (“There Will Come Soft Rains” and Fahrenheit 451).
In most instances, creators of these hell-on-earth visions draw on the perversion of science and technology as a major determinant of society’s function and control. For example, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is set in a California dystopia that features a fire department whose sole purpose is book burning. Likewise, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World contains a baby factory capable of manufacturing the prescribed number of people in each of five intellectual levels and indoctrination centers that train the resultant infants to embrace their lot in life. In contrast to the technical wizardry of Capek, Burgess, Bradbury, and Orwell, Rand, in Anthem, evolves a society in which innovation is suppressed and people are forced to live in primitive squalor.
Atwood, whose Handmaid’s Tale demonstrates elements inherent in the dystopian genre, echoes numerous motifs and literary devices. Like Huxley’s creation of a drug-calmed society, her characters awaiting execution appear tranquilized by shots or pills. Like Huxley’s engineered reproduction, Atwood’s fictional Gilead depends on the allotment of enslaved babymakers as a means of assuring the birth of white children to repopulate a declining Caucasian nation. A factor that Atwood’s novel shares with Rand’s Anthem and Orwell’s Animal Farm is the subversion of aphorism as a means of indoctrination. Further enforced by overseers, these simplistic precepts are subject to change or reinterpretation, depending on the exigencies of the artificial society that they are meant to bolster and legitimize.
