How scary it is to watch handmaid’s tale today
A once unbelievable story becomes believable
Back in the early 1990s, shortly after I graduated from college, at the suggestion of one of my feminist friends I read Margaret Atwood’s book The Handmaid’s Tale. The book is a work of art, but it was clearly fiction. After all, our democratic institutions in the United States were far too strong to allow a theocratic takeover of our government. Right?
Fast forward thirty years. My wife and I have been streaming the Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu. I remember reading the book way back when, but remembered few details. Out of curiosity, I decided to revisit the book to see how closely the new series followed it.
Amazingly, the series is surprisingly faithful to the book. I had forgotten many details of the book, such as the different colored uniforms for the women based upon their status. But it’s all there. Somehow, watching the series today is far more disturbing than reading the book was or even seeing the movie starring Natasha Richardson and Robert Duvall that was produced back in the early 1990s.
On the one hand, the series has worked hard to modernize the environment. Technology that seemed fantastical is now reality. What’s more is the prominent presence of people of color. At the time, critics argued that the book represented a form of white feminism, one that completely ignored black people, calling them “children of Ham” who were banned from Gilead. In the series, Offred’s best friend Moira and her husband are both African-American, a serious departure from the book, but something that seems more in keeping with today’s culture.
Furthermore, where the book and original movie seemed to locate the story in some distant future, the series has a real sense of immediacy to it.
This could all happen today, to all of us, the show says. Unfortunately, that impression is based upon reality.
Back when I first read the book, I could not have imagined an African-American President or…
