Global Dystopias

Margaret Atwood’s award-winning dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, was published in 1985 to critical and popular success. The novel is set in a near-future in which right-wing fundamentalists overthrow the United States government and set up the Republic of Gilead in its place. Gilead is a totalitarian and theocratic state in which fertile women are kept in sexual slavery as Handmaids and forced to bear children for infertile couples.

junot díaz: “Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again” was a phrase used on many signs in January’s Women’s March, highlighting that a lot of people feel life under Trump is a dystopia for women. Do you feel that way?

margaret atwood: Yes. I’m in Canada but, as you know, I lived in the States for some years and have a lot of friends there. It’s not only Trump. The general climate in some parts of the United States is certainly heading in a Handmaid’s Tale direction. And that is why the recent sit-ins in state legislatures were so immediately understandable, with groups of women in “Handmaid” costumes turning up, for instance, in Texas, while an all-male batch of lawmakers were passing laws on women’s health issues. They just sat there, they didn’t say anything, so they couldn’t be ejected, and there was a very telling photograph of them surrounded by men with guns, which could have been right out of the Hulu television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale.

jd: So our society is in many ways doing a better job of reenacting the book than one would have imagined possible.

ma: Much more than one would have imagined. In 1985 it was only a possibility. In some places in the United States today, it’s approaching reality. And as you know, I put nothing into the book that people had not done at some time, in some place. And in some countries in the world, these are pretty much the realities now.

jd: I read The Handmaid’s Tale when it was first published, and despite the rapid rise of the religious right and its effort to roll back reproductive rights in that decade, the world in the book still felt distant. Are you struck by how, for those who are just coming to the book now, reading it is a very different experience?

ma: It is quite different now. There were national differences at the time of publication. In England it was viewed as a jolly good yarn, but they didn’t think of Gilead as something that was going to happen to them, because they did their religious warfare in the seventeenth century and had lived through a lot of other bad stuff that they thought they had gotten over—although, in recent days, apparently not. In Canada it was the usual worried Canadian question—“Could it happen here?”— though I didn’t have to explain to Canadians why my characters were escaping to Canada, because we have been escaped to quite a lot in history. But in the United States, particularly on the West Coast, they said—somebody spray-painted on the Venice Beach seawall—“The Handmaid’s Tale is already here.” That was in 1985.

Some people mistakenly thought that the book was somehow anti-Christian. That’s not the case that is being made. Some Christians would resist such a regime, and do in the book. Others would be eliminated by the regime, because they would be the competition. And others would use religion as an excuse for what they’re doing—which has certainly happened a lot in history too, with all sorts of religions.

jd: When I recall the novel’s reception in the eighties, there was a lot of turmoil around the question of whether the novel was too hard on fundamentalist Christians. And yet, now, of course, that criticism has fallen away, and it seems to me that what was most frightening about the novel is only now coming to the foreground.

It also seems there’s more space to talk about the state-sanctioned rape that the novel portrays than there was in the mid-eighties.

ma: Oh, for sure. Well, part of the exploration is, if you want to take the Bible literally, how literally do you want to take it? Which parts are you going to be “literal” about? The Bible is an amazingly compendious book, and people have been foregrounding parts of it and backgrounding other parts since forever. But if you want to take the text literally—polygamy and using “handmaids” as surrogate mothers despite anything they might have to say about it—it’s right there. Joseph and his two wives, Rachel and Leah, and their two handmaids; amongst the four women they have twelve sons, but the wives claim the handmaids’ babies, which is why I put an excerpt from Genesis at the front of the book, and why I called the training place for Handmaids the Rachel and Leah Center. It’s very literal.

But the real question is, if the United States were going to have totalitarianism, what kind of totalitarianism would it be? We’ve had all kinds in the world, including atheist ones. But if the United States were ever going to go down that path, what would be the device under which it would do it? It certainly would not be communism.

jd: I think that’s very true. You’ve said before that Gilead already exists at low levels in many places.

ma: No kidding. And sometimes at pretty high levels too. There are thirteen countries in the world in which homosexuality is punishable by death.

jd: Yes. That’s another element of the novel that I think is even more resonant today than it was in the mid-eighties. You have what we might call the “long view.” Do these times we’re living in feel particularly apocalyptic? In your life, what other dark periods do these times recall?

ma: Well, since I was born in 1939, two months after World War II began, of course I was immersed in news about totalitarianism growing up—Nazis, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, followed by Mao Zedong. And then we’ve had more than a couple since that time, such as Cambodia under Pol Pot, and Romania, where Nicolae Ceaușescu mandated four children per woman, whether the woman could afford those children or not, and you had to have a fertility test every month, and if you weren’t pregnant, you had to say why. What was the result? A lot of orphanages, a lot of neglected children, and a lot of dead women. So if the United States wants to go in that direction, how will it prepare for the results? Is that what it wants, orphans, dead women, and so forth?

Then there’s child-stealing—again, I put nothing in the book that people have not done—there have been so many instances of that throughout history. Amongst them, Hitler stole 12,000 blond Polish children and placed them with German families, hoping they would turn into blond German children. And he had the Lebensborn program for SS families, in which unmarried women produced children for them. And of course in Argentina, under the generals—where they were dropping people out of planes—if you were pregnant, they didn’t drop you out of a plane or otherwise kill you until you had the baby, and then they placed the child with a high-ranking junta family. And the fallout now is that some of the children grew up and then found out the truth about their background.

jd: Listening to that tour of hell that you just gave, one thing that’s really striking, and that recalls the Gilead regime, is the centrality of children. That, yes, we’ve got these enemies of the state whom we’re going to torture to death, but they do have these children who are a very valuable resource.

ma: That’s right. Gilead, of course, is arranged as a true totalitarianism, where the people at the top get the good stuff. Children are seen as the good stuff, due to their rarity.

jd: In your novel, one of the ways that Gilead defines who is “other” is through race, and it dispatches the non-white with Nazi precision.

ma: They are put into closed “homelands.” As in apartheid South Africa.

jd: It has been remarked that the Hulu adaptation mutes this.

ma: Hulu updated the time period of the “before” part of the show to now. In 1985 it was much more plausible that you might be able to carry out that kind of resegregation.

jd: To round up all the folks of color.

ma: Yes. But the television version—which gave us Samira Wiley as Moira, for which we are grateful—takes the view that there are, at the present time, many more interracial friendships and relationships than there would have been in 1985. Which is true. And Bruce Miller, the showrunner, said, in essence, who wants to watch a show that’s all white people? Not to mention that Hulu has a general policy of diversity. We also both felt that in Gilead—the modern television version—fertility would rank higher than racialization as a way of categorizing people and deciding who gets what treatment.

jd: Women in the homelands or “Colonies,” if they are difficult (to use a euphemism), get sent to the secret Gilead brothel of the Jezebels.

ma: I would contend that it might be easier to escape from Jezebels. So, from the point of view of somebody writing the television script, having Moira at Jezebels means there’s a chance she could get out. And she has gotten out once before.

jd: I was in Toronto recently and it was a very fascinating time to be there. It was just becoming clear at the time what an explosive success The Handmaid’s Tale show was going to be. I spent four days there talking to a whole bunch of smart, bright young folks. Kind of the new face of Toronto. And it seems that currently Toronto—and we could say by extension Canada—has two global superstars: Margaret Atwood and Drake. Have you met Drake?

ma: I haven’t met Drake, but I have of course met people who have met Drake. But you have to realize how old I am. I’m not likely to go to the same parties. Or many parties at all, to be frank.

jd: I understand. I just think that, Canada—I’ll say this to the whole nation—you are missing a great opportunity to put these two folks together.

ma: Wouldn’t it be fun for him to have a cameo in the second season of The Handmaid’s Tale? I’ll drop that notion into the ear of Miller and see what he can do, because the show is filmed in Toronto. Maybe Drake could help smuggle someone?

jd: It is an extraordinary time. I’ve never seen young Canadians so thrilled to have these models.

ma: And energized. Toronto is, according to the people who count, the most diverse city in the world.

jd: A lot of these young folks were saying to me that a very Canadian virtue is to be humble, not to dream too big. And I have to say, you have given a lot of young people—you and Drake—new horizons. And it is a wonderful thing to see.

ma: Thank you. You’ve given me a new idea. Drake in The Handmaid’s Tale!