Story of Handmaid’s Tale becoming ‘more and more plausible’ – Margaret Atwood

[IwantToRetire]

Award-winning author Margaret Atwood has said the events depicted in her book The Handmaid’s Tale, which tells the story of an authoritarian regime, are becoming “more and more plausible”.

The Canadian writer, 86, published the futuristic novel in 1985 and followed it up with Booker Prize-winning story The Testaments in 2019, both of which inspired the dystopian TV series starring US actress Elisabeth Moss.

In the book, the US is replaced by a theocratic, totalitarian regime called the Republic of Gilead which has subjugated women, many of whom are forced to be natal slaves called handmaids, tasked with rebuilding the species amid worldwide infertility.

Atwood thought the plot was “bonkers” when she first came up with the idea and said “America was the beacon of light” at the time.

Women across the US have worn red cloaks and wings while protesting against the administration of US President Donald Trump, who has taken credit for returning the abortion debate to the agenda and helping overturn the Roe v Wade ruling on abortion rights.

Atwood added: “These kinds of regimes don’t last, partly because they become unsustainable. This particular one seems quite chaotic.

https://www.aol.co.uk/articles/story-handmaid-tale-becoming-more-000100637.html

I re read AHMT recently, probably 30 years since I read it.

I am gobsmacked by Atwood. How she can have written that book and hold the view that TWAany sort of W - it is just bonkers

Go back in time, and she used to be more honest about the book's genesis. It was specifically inspired by the Iranian Revolution and how that turned out for women.

Someone who isn't beholden to the image of Atwood as a prophet would say that she started with the Iranian Revolution but, as a good liberal Canadian, made her villains white American Christians, who are a permanently acceptable target in Canada, rather than Persian Muslims.

Even from the viewpoint of way-out fundamentalist Christians in the US, who are less influential than Louis Theroux documentaries would have us believe, there's very little in The Handmaid's Tale that makes any kind of theological sense. I'll give her this, she's better at writing potboiler smut than Sally Rooney.

If anyone wants to read a good dystopian novel on what might happen in a fertility bust, Children of Men by PD James is well worth checking out.

This is very valuable context

This thread is a very good example of how feminists have been very effectively split using trans issues. OP starts a thread about reproductive rights and nearly all the responses are about what Margaret Atwood thinks about trans women.

I understand the need to protect women's spaces but please can we stop viewing the world through the lense of one issue, access to abortion is important and hard won rights are rolling back.

Award-winning author Margaret Atwood has said the events depicted in her book The Handmaid’s Tale, which tells the story of an authoritarian regime, are becoming “more and more plausible”.

Has she not seen what’s happening in Afghanistan? Or is she saying she thinks it’s plausible for America?

Strange how this thread immediately started discussing TWAW. Which, I don't remember, being a theme of the Handsmaid Tale book (haven't watched the series).

I can't imagine many aspects of the book being "just round the corner", however I read an article about a pregnant woman in Georgia America: after a brain injury being forced to carry the baby to term and give birth, with her family footing the bill due to the overturning of Wade vs Roe and it did remind me of Gilead...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adriana_Smith_pregnancy_case

I think the issue here goes beyond Atwood and into the Left's position on women's rights more generally.

Left leaning parties are heavily into supporting women's rights to abortion and (quite rightly) calling out certain elements of the right who want to restrict them. So far, so good.

But at exactly the same time, many left leaning parties are full on TWAW and are actively against women's rights to single sex prisons, rape crisis centres, sports, domestic violence shelters, etc, etc.

The hypocrisy of this is staggering and it's made me rethink everything I thought I knew about the Left. How can they be genuinely supportive of women if they drop their needs like a hot potato the second trans identifying men say they want into their spaces?

The cynic in me also notes that women having abortion rights can have benefits for the men of the left, but securing women's single sex spaces is clearly less motivating for men at a personal level.

For me, it's about trying to digest the position of people who would uphold my right to abortion on the one hand (great) but also have no problem
with me being locked up with a man in a prison cell on the other (horrific).

I can't get over the cognitive dissonance of that (sorry) and so it's always going to come up for me in conversations like this.

Atwood causes very specific pain, because in THMT she seemed to understand / illuminate the plight of women so very well. Her embrace of TWAW feels like a huge betrayal. She's too smart to not understand the implications of her position. She is choosing to screw women over on this specific issue.

I'm just shocked by, and can't agree with, forced birthing, as described here, which happened in the USA this year. Truely shocking and Gilead like.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adriana_Smith_pregnancy_case

Well of course.

Yet that (and a whole lot worse) has been going on in many non western countries for decades. Aren't you shocked at that too? What about the rollback of women's rights in Afghanistan for example?

Personally, I am shocked at the many and multiple ways men assert their authority over women, in countless countries, with regards to reproductive rights and a whole lot more.

Margaret Atwood does not believe TWAW. It is literally impossible for Margaret Atwood to believe TWAW. Whether or not you agree with Atwood's brand of feminism, it is indisputable that her feminism is massively centred on the female body and its reproductive capacity.

On the other hand Atwood is a Good Liberal Canadian, of a very familiar type, and every Good Liberal Canadian knows that TWAW is something you have to say, and if you don't actually believe it you keep it to yourself.

We saw this a couple of years back when Atwood was mobbed by TRAs on Twitter. Being a nice old lady who gets her news from CBC and assumes that the different parts of the progressive coalition are all shiny happy people holding hands, she was shocked at being monstered by the TRAs and eventually - this says something about her moral courage - responded with a "do it to Joanne!" post.

Margaret Atwood is not the reason why I dislike political tribalism, but she's a really good illustration of how tribalism screws you over.

Quite.

I thought she was a lot better than this. I was wrong.

My disappointment in her is emblematic of my disappointment in an entire political class. But there is something very hard to take in the woman who wrote THMT screwing her fellow females over like this.

Exactly, that bbc article someone posted appears to have completely glossed over that, there is a vague reference to Saudi Arabia allowing executions but that’s it.

Excuse my tetchiness, but there are two things I really can't stand - group stereotyping and liberal Canadians.

Mike Myers wrote a book about Canada's history as a kind of triumphant march of progress culminating in the ascent to power of Myers' good friend Justin Trudeau.

And the Canadian government, which is notorious worldwide for its pettifogging interference in its citizens' lives, refuses to stop Myers threatening the world with yet another Austin Powers sequel, where we would be inflicted with a sixty-something Myers gurning his way through endless catchphrases and fart jokes.

This is the moral universe in which Margaret Atwood lives.

Iran and Afghanistan are far closer to The Handmaid’s Tale than the US will ever be.

@DropHopStopthe mother was brain dead in that case, why should the baby lose its life too because the mother has died of it can be saved? How do you know it’s not what the mother would have wanted.

I can’t imagine being the family and not wanting to protect the baby in these tragic circumstances.

Gestating a baby in a dead mother was a grotesque scientific experiment which was unlikely to result in a healthy baby as indeed it hasn’t.

Have you read the case details? The fetus was only 9 weeks since conception. Pre overturning Wade vs Roe life support would have been shut off in that case. There is much debate about the specific case.

The thing that got me: The mother was kept alive only to carry the fetus to term. Then the family was sent the bill, including all bills for continued medical care of the baby, which if the baby survives, will likely need advanced care for life. It feels classic Gilead and forced birthing. Obviously some people agree with forced birthing, but many don't.

I'm just incredibly shocked by forced birthing examples in a (democratic) county I'm a citizen of (USA) that result from recent specific legal changes (Roe v. Wade).

This is because these are things in my own sphere of influence, where I have a voice and a vote. The details of the case I shared feel particularly dystopian and insidious. I think every feminist against forced birthing in the USA should be making noise about this.

Brining back to Handmaid's Tale: Forced birthing examples in the USA makes me think we (USA) are getting closer to Gilead, in that specific way.

Does it need to be right vs. left?

Many right wing political parties will claim to be defending women's rights while looking to strip back abortion access - look at the USA, and now Nigel Farage making comments about reducing the available term for abortion.

Wonderful post @SionnachRuadh . ‘Do it to Joanne’ sums up Margaret Atwood’s legacy for me in one line. Put Joanne in the jail cell with a man, make Joanne get undressed at work for the pleasure of that man, send Joanne’s young daughter into that swimming pool changeroom not knowing if there will be men in there or not. Just let me enjoy my literary festivals in peace. MA’s fiction stands on its own merit, it may always do so. But history will not judge her as anyone with courage or intellectual integrity. That place seems reserved for JKR and Chimanda Ngozi Adiche in the literary canon of our day.

You don't know it's what the mother wanted. In this instance the mother was the patient and her doctors should have acted in her best interests. Using the opportunity to test the limits of intensive care on gestation was not in her interests.

The 9 week old foetus was not their patient and shouldn't have been the primary consideration in treatment decisions.

@DropHopStop I have read the details of the case. The baby survived and the family launched a Go Fund Me to help with the medical expenses.

If I was pregnant and declared brain dead I would of course want my baby to have a chance at life and I can’t imagine my family feeling any differently. Why turn one death into two if a life can be saved. This of course is an incredibly rare event but has happened in other countries and has been celebrated as a medical miracle.

I am pro choice.

@Onlyontuesday whose patient was the foetus?

It was a 9 week old foetus and so was neither a person nor a patient.

@Onlyontuesday and as the mother was brain dead neither was she a “patient” in a legal sense.