Handmaid's Tale

I always thought Attwood was a misgnyist, Mad Adam, in fact the whole trilogy is also quite racist and classist. The working class male characters are little more than animals but the posh ones are described in contrastingly human ways. She has zero black charectors in any of her books that Iv read.

It always surprises me when surprise is expressed about Margaret Atwood.

Margaret Atwood so obviously enjoys heaping misery on her female characters. She's never struck me as being supportive of women.

I take your point Floral but I have watched the series so far and the first season absolutely solidified my position against surrogacy. As the series has continued the direction to me seems quite genuinely feminist. I have thought that the more brutal scenes were managed so as to keep the woman’s perspective rather than the man’s and to minimise titillating but I may be mistaken. There is plenty of scenes where women take revenge on the men. The exploration of motherhood has been something we rarely see on screen. Motherhood is central to the series I think and the suffering of mother and child when they are separated. It brings to mind the suffering inflicted by the Irish mother and baby homes scandal also.

One question I don’t know the answer to yet in the show, what happens to wives in Gilead when their husbands die? I find it hard to imagine that they are allowed to live on as mistress of their own home and to keep charge of their children, their own or those they have kidnapped. Are wives able to inherit their husband’s property? Maybe that will be revealed in the next series.

Margaret Atwood is old and has been very successful in Canada for decades. She won’t need to bleat TWAW to survive professionally - either she believes it or doesn’t want to “be on the wrong side of history”.

She may be lovely in private, but being Canadian I’ve had to see her interviewers a lot on telly. She comes across as very full of herself and smug. Her nasal voice is also annoying as fuck (sorry, been wanting to get my Atwood irritation off my chest for a long time).

That's an interesting perspective, Floral. There's certainly something about it that makes me feel on edge so maybe it's that- in the back of my mind I know it's not really fiction as similar things happen to women globally every day.
I have read both books and find the 'add ons' in the show stray far from the novel. In the book the husband is very clearly dead so it's much more bleak. I initially liked that they picked a very normal looking actress for the lead too. Have got annoyed with the annoying amount of plot armour they've given her.

Ironic she wrote about handmaidens and then became one really.

The finale is to be The Handmaid's Tail

I can't watch. She has sold out and it is so far from the book and her usual style I can only assume its for the money
It's all for the shock factor
MA being down with the kids, cool girl TWAW has put me right off her
I read the original years ago when she said that everything in the book was actually happening to women somewhere in the world. The ending was very typical of her and I don't believe she ever intended a second book. Even though her writing is more dystopian fiction than feminist I can't understand how she can go from THT to TWAW

I don't watch it. It's entertainment predicated on the coercion, abuse and rape of women. Yes, all the situations in the book were based on things that really happened to women, but there was a polemical point to it.
The TV adaptation serves to visually titillate, it does not challenge the current real life situations where women are coerced, abused and raped, and, as has been pointed out, Atwood is full on TWAW.

As far as I'm concerned, she is exploiting the historical and current abuse of women for her own gain.

@Terrazzo I wonder whether she really does believe it, or is saying what she needs to say to survive professionally in Canada.

I was most disappointed to read about that the other day @JellySlice What the hell! How can she have written handmaids tale and believe sex is fluid??

Hard to believe that Margaret Atwood is full-on Be Kind TWAW.