Fierce Facts About The Handmaid’s Tale
“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.” (“Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”) —a Latin joke, and a rule for survival in Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood’s iconic novel The Handmaid’s Tale has captivated countless readers since it was published in 1985. The novel is set in the dystopian Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian theocracy under which the few women still able to bear children (following a fertility crisis due to environmental destruction) work as “Handmaids” for wealthy and powerful men. This evocative story has spawned ƒninumerous adaptations including an opera, a graphic novel, a fashion line, and, most recently, the acclaimed television series produced by Hulu and starring Elisabeth Moss. Motifs and slogans from the novel have also been displayed during political marches and protests; many people see parallels between the novel’s dystopian society and current political trends. Below are 30 facts about The Handmaid’s Tale.
The Handmaid’s Tale Facts
1. Writing Eyes
Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale while living in West Berlin in 1984, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and she has stated that this environment inspired some of the content of her dystopian novel. “I experienced the wariness,” she wrote, “the feeling of being spied on, the silences, the changes of subject, the oblique ways in which people might convey information, and these had an influence on what I was writing.”
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2. The Power of the Pen
Atwood composed most of the book in longhand on yellow legal notepads before typing it up on a rented manual typewriter. This seems oddly fitting for a story set in a future where women are not permitted access to writing implements.
3. The Handmaid of Fred’s Tale
Atwood’s original title for the novel was “Offred,” after the narrator and main character. The title she eventually chose alludes both to Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and to fairy and folk tales. As Atwood remarks, “The story told by the central character partakes—for later or remote listeners—of the unbelievable, the fantastic, as do the stories told by those who have survived earth-shattering events.”
