Episode Details

Margaret Atwood's famous novel The Handmaid's Tale was published in 1984, a year laden with significance for dystopian views of the future.  Some sort of violent, apocalyptic event has resulted in the United States being taken over by an autocratic, quasi religious police state, now called Gilead, in which the role of women has been largely reduced to reproduction and domestic service. They are required to wear coloured dresses - red for the Handmaids who are the childbearers, green for the Marthas who do the housework - and any sort of social contact is strictly controlled. The Handmaids are impregnated by high status men known as Commanders, while being physically held in place by the Commander's wife, in an event known as the Ceremony. The central character, now known as Offred, initially appears to accept this state of affairs, but gradually becomes aware of the existence of an underground resistance movement which may offer a means of escape. Atwood's novel explores issues of feminism, and sexual and gender relationships, and its vision of women being denied any form of individual identity or the means to express opinions or feelings was heavily influenced by the Iranian revolution of a few years before, and finds echoes in the situation that women find themselves in in Afghanistan today. The book has many echoes of Orwell's great novel, brilliantly capturing the claustrophobia and fear that living in a tightly controlled surveillance state involves. But does the novel convince? Are its religious aspects a warning of the consequences of indulging the kind of intolerant religious groups gaining traction today? And has the feminist vision  Atwood presents become superseded by the MeToo generation? Join us on Book In to find out.