The Handmaid's Tale has scored a whopping 76 Emmy nominations and taken home 15 awards over the years. The show is based on Margaret Atwood's novel of the same name, set in a super oppressive and dystopian version of the future Republic of Gilead that's taken over the former United States. No wonder the book is now the most-read non-fiction title on Kindle - especially with some of the political and social stuff going down in the real world lately.
"We're living in a seriously anxiety-inducing time because so many long-held beliefs are being questioned and overturned," Atwood says from her hometown of Toronto.
The brutal, sickening scenes are reminiscent of radical Islamist regimes and South American dictatorships. But they take place in a twisted dystopian America; the makeshift prison is in Harvard's football stadium. For tons of Atwood's U.S. fans, this nightmare vision feels terrifyingly real.
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood and Hulu portray Gilead, a society gone backward in time, stripping women of basic human rights and killing off anyone who questions the new regime. It imagines an American Taliban - a supposedly Christian cult preaching biblical fundamentalism without ever mentioning Jesus - infiltrating the US military enough to seize power in a coup. It also assumes most Americans could quickly accept a "new normal" where heretics and gays are publicly hanged while women can't work, own property, or read. (A small group of female enforcers, the "Aunts," have a bit more freedom.)
Atwood's explanation for her thinking - revolutions always build on what's already there, so chaos in the U.S. could bring a radical regime drawing on deep 17th-century New England Puritan roots - mainly shows she doesn't really get America or Puritanism. Atwood started writing The Handmaid's Tale in 1984 while living in West Berlin on a grant for artists and writers to live and work in the Allied-occupied district.
"When I was writing it, the U.S. was still seen as a beacon of liberal democracy, a model for the rest of the world. We're not there anymore because the world has changed, and so has the U.S.," Atwood says.
That's why more people now see The Handmaid's Tale as more plausible than when it first came out. But things have changed; take the recent appointment of questionable ultra-right-wing Supreme Court judges near the end of the Trump presidency, despite passionate opposition. Those appointments led to huge setbacks for progress made by women and marginalized groups in the U.S.
The only good news is more and more folks are noticing the similarities between Atwood's fictional world and what's happening in the U.S. today.
