The Handmaid's Tale

• 1. Introduction

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  The Handmaid's Tale, the 1985 novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, arrived with a paper trail. Atwood was known to carry newspaper clippings to her interviews, ready to show that her fiction rested on fact. Speaking about a later novel, she compared it to this one. She said she "didn't put in anything that we haven't already done, we're not already doing, we're seriously trying to do." Then she drew the conclusion herself: "the amount of pure invention is close to nil."

  That claim sits strangely beside the book. It is set in a near-future New England, where a theocratic Republic of Gilead has overthrown the United States government. Fertile women there are assigned to bear children for high-ranking men. The narrator is one of them, a woman called Offred.

  So where did a writer find the raw material for such a republic? How does a state govern women through color, naming and ritual? And why does a work of invention that claims so little invention still cause fights in school boardrooms, decades later?

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• 2. Clippings and Precedents

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  In the spring of 1984, Atwood began the manuscript in West Berlin. She returned to Canada in June and wrote through the fall. She finished the book in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, during the spring semester of 1985, while holding an MFA chair in the English department at the University of Alabama. The copyright page thanks the D.A.A.D in West Berlin and the Alabama department for "time and space."

  The first reader was her friend and fellow novelist Valerie Martin, who was teaching at Alabama too. Atwood remembers a mild verdict along the lines of "I think you've got something here." Martin remembers her own reaction as closer to "you're about to be rich!"

  The idea for Gilead itself came from Harvard, where Atwood studied early American Puritans on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. She rejects the popular picture of Puritans as refugees seeking tolerance. In her reading, their leaders wanted a single, unified theonomy where dissent would not be allowed. She dedicated the novel to her ancestor Mary Webster, who was accused of witchcraft in Puritan New England and survived her hanging.

  Other regimes supplied other pieces. The Islamic revolution in Iran in 1978-79 imposed a strict dress code on women, and the book's endnotes mention a history titled Iran and Gilead: Two Late Twentieth Century Monotheocracies. The killing of dissidents recalls the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos. Nicolae Ceaușescu's Decree 770 in Romania outlawed birth control and abortion and brought strict policing of pregnant women. Atwood also points to Afghanistan, where women were pushed out of public life and into their homes. Cambodia and Romania, she says, fed the "utopian idealism" she gave Gilead's rulers.

  Atwood's own childhood supplied a quieter source. She was born in 1939, and in the 1950s she watched the backlash against women who kept their wartime jobs after 1945. She also watched women who unhappily surrendered those jobs. Offred's slide into unwilling housewife grew from those memories.

  One more observation came from home. Atwood watched politicians in Toronto speak with great sanctimony about high moral principle while behaving in the opposite way, and she gave that habit to the men who run Gilead.

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• 3. Colors of Rank

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  Sky blue is the color of a Commander's Wife, and in Gilead a color tells you everything. The Wives' blue recalls traditional depictions of the Virgin Mary in historic Christian art. A Commander's unmarried daughters wear white until the government arranges their marriages. A Wife whose husband dies becomes a Widow and must wear black unless she remarries.

  Handmaids wear ankle-length red dresses with white headgear. In public they add heavy bonnets that block their side vision and hide their faces. Aunts, who train and police the Handmaids, wear brown. They are the only women allowed to read and write, and only so that they can do their administrative work.

  Marthas wear green. They are older, infertile domestic servants, and their title comes from the Gospel of Luke, in which Martha busies herself with preparations while her sister Mary listens to Jesus. Econowives, married to men outside the elite, wear red, blue and green stripes in cheaper cloth. The stripes reflect their triple duty of housework, companionship and childbearing.

  In the hidden brothels, Jezebels wear leftovers of sexualized costumes from "the time before," including cheerleader outfits, school uniforms and Playboy Bunny costumes. They have been sterilized, a surgery forbidden to other women. Men mostly wear military or paramilitary uniforms.

  Names work the same way as clothes. A Handmaid is called "of" plus the first name of the man whose house she lives in, so Offred means "of Fred." Her name changes when her household does. It is also a pun on "offered," as in offered as a sacrifice, and on "of red." Offred herself says she is not a concubine but a tool, a "two-legged womb."

  At the bottom stand the Unwomen: the sterile, the unmarried, feminists, lesbians, nuns and dissidents. They are sent to the Colonies, where farming meets deadly pollution, and where both men and women wear grey. A Handmaid who fails to bear a child after three two-year assignments is sent there as well.

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• 4. Scripture Twisted

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  In the Book of Genesis, Jacob's wife Rachel is infertile, so she offers her handmaid Bilhah to him as a surrogate mother. Her sister Leah does the same with her handmaid Zilpah, even though Leah has already borne Jacob many sons. Gilead adds the story of Abraham and Hagar, the handmaid of his wife. From these accounts, the regime builds its monthly ritual, known as the Ceremony.

  The Ceremony takes place during the Handmaid's likely fertile days, with the Wife present. The Handmaid lies on her back between the Wife's legs, as if the two women were one person. The Wife must invite her to share this power, and many Wives find it humiliating and offensive. Offred tries to name what happens and rejects each word in turn. She decides that even rape does not fit, because "nothing is going on here that I haven't signed up for." The line shows how a trapped narrator can talk herself into calling coercion a choice.

  Bruce Miller, who created the television series, described Gilead as "a society that's based kind of in a perverse misreading of Old Testament laws and codes." Atwood says its rulers are "not really interested in religion; they're interested in power." She calls her book not a critique of religion but a critique of religion used as a "front for tyranny."

  Gilead's treatment of actual faiths bears this out. Churches that do not support the Sons of Jacob are demolished. Quakers, Baptists, Jehovah's Witnesses and Roman Catholics are named as enemies. Nuns who refuse conversion become Unwomen, and priests who refuse are executed and hanged from the Wall. Of the Quakers, Atwood remarks that they "have gone underground, and are running an escape route to Canada, as-I suspect-they would."

  Offred keeps a private version of the Lord's Prayer. In it she says she does not believe "for an instant that what's going on out there is what You meant."

  Jews are treated differently. They are classified as Sons of Jacob, and those who refuse to convert may emigrate to Israel. Offred sees that most choose to leave. Only much later, in the book's closing pages, do readers learn that many emigrants were dumped into the sea from the ships carrying them, after the repatriation program was privatized and its operators chased profit.

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• 5. Scrabble and a Van

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  Offred's account opens during her third assignment as a Handmaid, in the house of a Commander and his wife Serena Joy. Serena Joy is a former Christian media personality, whom Offred remembers watching on television as a girl while waiting for the Saturday morning cartoons. She had championed domesticity for women long before Gilead existed. Now she is confined to gardening and knitting, and she treats Offred poorly.

  The Commander's first surprise is a request to see Offred privately, outside the Ceremony. Meeting in his library is illegal, yet they do it. They play Scrabble, and Offred may ask him for favors, such as information or small items. He asks her to kiss him "as if she meant it" and confides that his wife misunderstands him. Offred learns that his previous Handmaid had a similar arrangement and killed herself when his wife found out.

  Then he gives Offred lingerie and takes her to a government-run club staffed by Jezebels. There she meets Moira, her friend since college, who once escaped the training center by stealing an Aunt's pass and clothes. Moira was caught and chose the brothel over the Colonies.

  Elsewhere, Offred's shopping partner Ofglen reveals that she belongs to Mayday, an underground network working to overthrow Gilead. Serena Joy begins to suspect her husband is the infertile one and arranges for Offred to sleep with Nick, the Commander's driver. In exchange, she offers news of Offred's daughter and brings a photograph. Offred feels erased from her daughter's life.

  Offred and Nick keep meeting on their own, and eventually she tells him she thinks she is pregnant. Then a new walking partner tells her that Ofglen has disappeared, reported as a suicide. When Serena Joy finds proof of the library meetings, men in the uniforms of the secret police, called the Eyes, come to the door. Nick tells Offred to trust him and go with them.

  She cannot tell whether the men are Eyes or secret members of Mayday. She steps into the van anyway.

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• 6. The Professor's Tapes

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  The year is 2195, and a conference of historians is meeting in Nunavut. The novel ends with a partial transcript of its proceedings, titled the "Historical Notes." The keynote speaker, Professor Pieixoto, explains that Offred's story survived on audio cassettes, a technology roughly 200 years out of date by then. He and a colleague, Professor Knotly Wade, discovered the tapes, and historians later transcribed them.

  Pieixoto treats Gilead's misogyny with a shrug, and he reads the book's title as a sexist joke. His talk dwells on the "Problems of Authentication." Few records survive from Gilead's early years, and he can only speculate. He guesses that the Commander was Frederick R. Waterford, killed in a purge soon after Offred's removal for harboring an enemy agent. He suggests that Serena Joy's real name was Thelma. His epilogue also hints that Nick really did belong to the resistance and helped Offred escape.

  Atwood designed the section as a warning to academics who risk misreading historical texts. By talking over Offred, the male professor takes her narrative over with his own interpretation. It also makes the whole account less reliable than it already was.

  The tapes never give Offred's real name, but readers have hunted for it. In the prologue, women in training whisper names across their beds at night: "Alma. Janine. Dolores. Moira. June." Every one of them later appears as a character except June. An Aunt also scolds trainees for "mooning and June-ing." Atwood says she did not originally mean Offred to be June, "but it fits, so readers are welcome to it if they wish."

  Adaptations have chosen differently. The 1990 film called her Kate, while the 2017 television series names her June outright. The scholar Madonne Miner has gone another way. She suggests that "June" may be an invention of the narrator, since Mayday is the name of the resistance, and the 2195 conference is held in June.

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• 7. Arguments Over Meaning

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  "A study of power, and how it operates and how it deforms or shapes the people who are living within that kind of regime." That is how Atwood describes her book, and she resists reading it as a purely feminist dystopia. In her account, Gilead is a pyramid, with powerful men and women at the top, the men generally outranking the women at each level. At the very bottom, unmarried men must serve in the ranks before they earn an Econowife.

  Still, the feminist label has stuck. In 1985, reviewers called the book a "feminist 1984." Some scholars read it as a condemnation of religious fundamentalism in American life. Others note that it undermines the ideal of women helping women, pointing instead to a "new form of misogyny: women's hatred of women." Aisha Matthews links the triangle of Offred, Serena Joy and the Commander to patriarchal standards in the real world.

  Race is a sharper criticism. African Americans, called the Children of Ham, are relocated "en masse" to "National Homelands" in North Dakota, a detail that suggests apartheid-era South African homelands. The novel also implies a genocide of Native Americans. Ana Cottle calls the book "White feminism." She says it dispatches Black people in a few lines while borrowing from the African-American experience, including anti-literacy laws and the removal of surnames from Handmaids.

  Genre has been argued over too. Atwood calls the book speculative fiction rather than science fiction, because it uses means "already to hand, such as DNA identification and credit cards." The critic David Langford joked that the novel won the first Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987 and that Atwood "has been trying to live this down ever since."

  The surveillance in Gilead draws on Michel Foucault's idea of panopticism. Prisoners who know they might be watched begin to police themselves. In Gilead, the word "eye" is everywhere, from the secret police to the greeting "Under His Eye." Handmaids are never alone and must watch each other.

  The philosopher Andy Lamey finds echoes of Plato's Republic, including a state eugenics program and a ruling class legitimized by propaganda. But he stresses that the echoes are distorted. Plato's gymnasiums teach women to be men's equals, while Gilead's teach Handmaids their duties. The training slogans twist Freud into "Pen is envy" and garble a line of Marx. In Lamey's reading, the book shows dictatorships doing what they often do, bending existing ideas to serve their own ends.

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• 8. Banned and Retold

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  Mary McCarthy's 1986 New York Times review was skeptical. She argued that the novel lacked the "surprised recognition" needed to make readers see "our present selves in a distorting mirror." Prize juries disagreed. The book won the 1985 Governor General's Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. It also won the first Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987 and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Canada and the Caribbean. It was nominated for the 1986 Booker Prize and Nebula Award and the 1987 Prometheus Award. In 2022 it joined the "Big Jubilee Read" list of 70 books by Commonwealth authors.

  It is also a classroom staple. Atwood's speculative novels often serve as examples for the final, open-ended question on the American Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition exam. Atwood says she was surprised, given her own censored schooling in the 1950s.

  The American Library Association ranked it number 37 on its list of the 100 most frequently challenged books of 1990-2000, and seventh in 2019. In North Carolina in 2012, parents petitioned a school board with a petition signed by 2300 people, calling the book sexually explicit and detrimental to Christian values. In 2021, a school district in Goddard, Kansas, removed more than two dozen books, citing challenges elsewhere. In March 2026, Utah banned the novel from all public schools. In 2025, it was one of over 200 books slated for removal from Edmonton Public Schools. Atwood answered with a satirical short story on social media, and after public backlash, Alberta premier Danielle Smith said the ministerial order would be rewritten.

  Atwood's own response in 2022 was a one-off object. Working with Penguin Random House, she produced an "unburnable" copy as a demonstration against censorship. It sold at auction in New York for $130,000.

  Meanwhile, the story kept changing form. Harold Pinter wrote the screenplay for the 1990 film directed by Volker Schlöndorff, with Natasha Richardson as Offred, Faye Dunaway as Serena Joy and Robert Duvall as the Commander. Poul Ruders's opera premiered in Copenhagen on the 6th of March 2000. The Royal Winnipeg Ballet premiered its version on the 16th of October 2013. Claire Danes's reading of the unabridged audiobook won the 2013 Audie Award for fiction.

  The Hulu television series, starring Elisabeth Moss, released its first three episodes on the 26th of April 2017, with Atwood as consulting producer. It won eight Primetime Emmy Awards that year, including Outstanding Drama Series. Its sixth season finally premiered on the 28th of April 2025, after a delay caused by the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. An authorized graphic novel illustrated by Renée Nault followed on the 26th of March 2019.

  Atwood announced a sequel in November 2018. The Testaments appeared in September 2019, set fifteen years after Offred's final scene, told in the testaments of three female narrators. In it, Aunt Lydia, the true believer of the first book, turns out to have been feeding information to resistance networks. Her leaks set off a purge that collapses Gilead, and her autobiography sits hidden in a copy of Cardinal John Henry Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua, on a restricted shelf in the Ardua Hall library.

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