The Handmaids’ Tale of Roe & Woe

You shall know them by the dumbness of their holy text

Pro-abortion cosplay, Handmaid style

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Let’s say you’re an activist who seeks to influence public opinion on an issue of great national importance—abortion, for instance. So what do you do? Why, you dress up as a character in one of the dumbest novels ever written, you rant and scream invective (making prodigal use of vulgarity and obscenity), you make threats, vandalize houses of worship, disrupt religious services, and even toss a few Molotov cocktails. You do all this because you’re a total idiot whose favorite book is The Handmaid’s Tale.

Margaret Atwood published her feminist nightmare novel in 1985; since then it has acquired canonical status in progressive circles. And why not? The Handmaid’s Tale harps on every string dear to the gnarled little heart of postmodern progressivism. Toxic masculinity, the Patriarchy, capitalism, religion—all get lined up to be gunned down by what Atwood no doubt believed was a withering barrage of satire. Along with Nineteen Eighty-four, her novel is progressivism’s go-to fictional portrayal of what life would be like if “ultra-MAGA,” as our absurd president has taken to calling conservatism, should triumph.

I suspect that many progressives have never bothered to read Nineteen Eighty-four and it’s fairly obvious that those who have read it didn’t quite get what Mr. Orwell was driving at. But most of the comrades have certainly read The Handmaid’s Tale or at least watched the Hulu series based on the novel. And no doubt because it confirms their every cherished bias, they’ve failed to note what an embarrassingly lame piece of work it is.

Don’t get me wrong: Atwood’s basic idea, that the United States might fall under the sway of a religious dictatorship, is not at all a bad one. As it happens, one of my favorites from the Golden Age of science fiction is Robert A. Heinlein’s 1940 novella “If This Goes On—”, which depicts just such a dystopian future. A comparison of this classic tale with Atwood’s screed reveals just how badly she bungled the scenario.

Reading “If This Goes On—,” you’ll likely be struck by its disquieting plausibility. Though the President of the United States has been replaced by the Prophet Incarnate and the Constitution by the rule of the saints, America is still recognizably America. People smoke Lucky Strikes and read The Saturday Evening Post; the Hollywood Bowl and West Point still exist. The religious oligarchy that runs America got its start when an obscure fundamentalist preacher received the bequest of a TV station from an admiring widow lady. The single station expanded into a network and the preacher became a national figure, eventually to be elected president, then to proclaim himself First Prophet. And readers find themselves thinking, Yeah, it really could happen that way…

Heinlein knew that plausibility is the key to selling readers on a speculative premise, and so did Orwell. In Nineteen Eighty-four Big Brother, Ingsoc, Newspeak and doublethink occupy the foreground; in the background is drab, ramshackle, bomb-scarred London, a landscape very familiar to British readers circa 1950. And that’s just the problem with The Handmaid’s Tale: its author couldn’t be bothered with plausibility.

Atwood never explains just how the United States devolved into a fundamentalist religious dictatorship. There are vague references to environmental catastrophe and a plague of sterility—these leading to a coup by a fundamentalist group calling itself the Sons of Jacob. But when you consider that the United States is a large, highly diverse nation that in 1985 had a population of around 250 million, this scenario is hard to swallow. Nor is it made clear whether Gilead, as the state is called, encompasses the entirety of the former United States or merely a portion of it. Also left annoyingly vague is the actual religious character of the regime. Though Atwood claims to have modelled the Sons of Jacob on the New England Puritans, she has also said that she doesn’t consider her fictional fundamentalists to be Christians.

Finally, The Handmaid’s Tale intimates that in a very short time the entire female population of America was reduced to a state of slavery. For in their various ways the Wives, Daughters, Handmaids, Marthas, Aunts and Econowives are just that: slaves of a religious Patriarchy that scarcely recognizes them as human beings. How was this even possible? The reader gets no explanation; the suspension of disbelief so necessary to the credibility of such a tale is never invited.

I think that Atwood’s big mistake was to locate her fantastic dystopian society in America’s immediate future. My foregoing criticisms would hold a lot less water if her tale were set in the year 2205, and not, as seems to be the case, in the early twenty-first century. If the old regime of female freedom and equality was a dream of the distant past, the novel’s vagueness about the origins of Gilead would have seemed natural and right. But in part at least, The Handmaid’s Tale was intended to be an ideological tract, a prophetic warning in the style of Nineteen Eighty-four, and this accounts for many of its flaws.

Now I’ve read Atwood’s novel—twice. I did so the first time because I’m a fan of dystopian fiction and to see what all the hoopla was all about; the second time to assure myself that I hadn’t missed something. And no, I hadn't. My original judgment stood: The Handmaid’s Tale is crap.

Lots of crappy fiction gets written, of course, and some of it’s quite good fun. Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls (1966) is an over-the-top potboiler, purple of prose, chock full of scandalous, often shocking, gossip about thinly disguised Hollywood celebrities of the day. You’d never mistake it for Anna Karenina, but in its vulgar, salacious way Valley of the Dolls is great entertainment. In 1967 the novel was adapted for the silver screen and it became one of the most beloved good-bad movies of all time. (Patty Duke’s hilariously inept performance as silver-throated guttersnipe Neely O’Hara is not to be missed.)

Admittedly The Handmaid’s Tale could be read in that sense: as farce, parody, a sendup of radical feminist obsessions. Considered as such, it might be good for a laugh or two. And actually the 1990 film version, starring Robert Duvall, Faye Dunaway and the late Natasha Richardson, is entertainingly farcical in places. The credit for that is mainly due to the touches of campiness supplied by Duvall and especially Dunaway. But the Hulu Original TV version, which premiered in 2017 and ran for four seasons, is depressingly faithful to Atwood’s vision. The sex scenes, if that’s the right term for them, bring home the absurdity of her scenario—meant to be shocking, they come off as lame, vulgar, even kind of funny.

Anyhow, it’s not hard to see why The Handmaid’s Tale is holy writ in progressive circles. Buttressing its radical feminist structure are themes of racism (blacks are called Sons of Ham and marked down for extermination), colonialism, imperialism, environmentalism and, of course, anti-Americanism. Atwood, who is Canadian, seems pretty sour about the Colossus of the South—why, oh why, is the Land of E Pluribus Unum so backward, so violent, so racist, so sexist, so religious? Or maybe it just makes her mad to reflect that a Canadian dystopia would be even more farcical than the one she dreamed up for America.

Ideologically or politically motivated fiction isn’t necessarily bad fiction: Nineteen Eighty-four is undoubtedly a masterpiece. But then there’s Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908), which though politically prescient (Orwell called it “a very remarkable prophecy of the rise of Fascism”) is virtually unreadable today. The Handmaid’s Tale falls into the same category. Who, indeed, would bother about this minor work by a middling writer if it hadn't become politically useful to the sanguinary death cult that styles itself “pro-choice”?