A Handmaid's Tale

by Margaret Atwood

---

In a word: heavy-handed

In a sentence: Handmaid Offred navigates the hyper-religious coup sweeping America attempting to reunite her family and find freedom.

Synopsis: As a result of a global infertility epidemic, Gilead emerges, a hyper-religious totalitarian military state. Gilead's primary goal is to produce babies, at any cost to their actual citizens, particularly the female ones.

Reactions: I will preface these reactions by stating that in general I'm not the most tremendous fan of dystopia as a genre. However, I can appreciate the great dystopias of our time such as Nineteen Eighty-Four. A Handmaid's Tale, I am disappointed to say, does not qualify.

The premise of the particular dystopian society fabricated by Margaret Atwood seems to be a religious totalitarian society motivated primarily to mitigate the devastation caused by an infertility epidemic. This structure is carried out by applying incredibly sexist rules to effectively the same government structure as that in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

In my unqualified opinion, the primary purpose of dystopia as a genre is to encourage the reader to contemplate the state of their current society from the lens of the hyperbolic standpoint in the dystopia. A Handmaid's Tale encourages the reader to have lots of babies. In a heavy-handed attempt to apply a feminist lens to her dystopia, Atwood has counter-productively reduced the women in her society to their base biological reproductive function. In doing so, rather than encouraging the reader to analyze the arguably sexist nature of our society, she has reduced women and sex to acts of reproduction rather than celebrating of love, body positivity, gender equality, or any notion that could garner empowerment or progress.

The Hulu Original Show A Handmaid's Tale, however, is a triumph. Skip the novel and watch the show instead.

Read if: you're big into dystopias or fads.