Written Task 2

Question: How does the text conform to, or deviate from, the conventions of a particular
genre, and for what purpose?

Text: The Handmaid’s Tale

Related Course: Part 4

Focus: Why is it confusing to place Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” into a genre
classification?

Outline:
- Exploring the significance of dystopian element in novel
- Exploring how Handmaids tale is recognized as science fiction
- Exploring the real-life precedents of Handmaids tale
- Exploring how Handmaids tale is recognized as speculative fiction
- Exploring author’s perspective on novel

When the Handmaid’s Tale was first published, it was categorized by many into the genre of
science fiction. This novel takes place in a future world reimagined, where the U.S.
government has been overthrown by a political group that goes as “The Sons of Jacob” and
a new country called the “Republic of Gilead” was created.

The Republic of Gilead is a totalitarian theocratic government. The change from democratic
government was triggered by mass infertility, anchoring the cause on a scientific issue. This
was one of the smaller reason as to why many thought the genre of this book is “Science
fiction”, which is defined as fiction based on imagined future scientific or technological
advances and major social and environmental changes. One of the most significant element
of the book that fits right into the genre was the presence of a dystopian society. This new
totalitarian government doesn’t allow for the rights of an individual, no one is able to legally
protect themselves from the government nor is there any outside power that will intervene.
Furthermore, as a theocratic government, they manipulate the system with cherry-picked
phrases from the Bible making the reason behind certain laws logically inaccurate, like the
decision that fertility is always a problem in the woman and never the man, just as it was
like in the Bible. In the book itself, Offred describes the “Red Center” as a palimpsest, but it
actually symbolizes the whole of “Gilead”. The old world has been erased and replaced by a
new one, but remnants of the pre-Gilead world cannot be fully erased.

The propaganda through the misuse of religion created a world that ticks all the right boxes
of utopian characteristics, though, it is only so for a selected few. The majority of characters
seen are rather oppressed by this world through the constant surveillance, reducing the
roles of women, forbidding literacy for women, division of clothing based off classes, forced
childbearing (surrogate) through a ritualized intercourse “ceremony”, which is also a
concept similarly adapted from the Old testament, story of Rachel and her handmaid
(Genesis 30:1). The Handmaids were brainwashed into thinking that in this life they are
given “freedom from” or “freedom to” and they’ve got “freedom from” which explains that
their safety against unwanted violence are unmatched compared to the previous world. The
subjugation of women had become the new norm and this is justified by selected passages
from the Bible. The strict attention given to the conformity of rules highlights how these
people are suffering from great injustice, which in turns emphasizes the dystopian theme of
the novel. Furthermore, this point is spotlighted by Atwood herself through Offred after an
exchange with Moira “there was more than one way of living with your head in the sand and
that if Moira thought she could create Utopia by shutting herself up in a women-only
enclave she was sadly mistaken.” The setting of the novel that takes place in the near future
and the epilogue that is placed much more further into the future is also a well-recognized
element of a science fiction literature.

The abandonment of technology for ceremonial systems and significant alteration in societal
values and attitude could render any person now uncomfortable. It all feels like fiction as it
seems make-believe compared to the world we currently live in. However, most of these
concepts actually had real life precedents. Some of the most prominent inspirations, among
others, would be the rise of the Christian right wings in America during the 1980’s and the
Iran Islamic revolution in the 1979. It had obvious parallels in aspects of political religious
takeover, religious intolerance, backwards attitudes and policies towards women. The
amount of biblical references and adaptations present in the book itself was a major clue on
the influence Christianity had on Handmaid’s Tale. Its foundation was dated back to the
17th-century Puritan roots, proven by the setting of novel in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a
city that had been ruled by theocratic Puritans that had resembling strict rules. The
Handmaids’ uniform which consists of white bonnets and long red gowns that hides their
body and face could be associated to the restrictions of woman’s clothing in extreme Islamic
groups. Like the rules of Iran that regulates women to wear headscarf’s and modest
clothing’s. Both republics share a common thread of patriarchy, violence and misogyny.

In Handmaids Tale, Margaret Atwood explored the possible consequences of our existing
political trends, she herself said in an interview that one of her rules when writing
Handmaid’s tale was that she “would not include anything that human beings had not
already done in some other place or time, or technology that did not already exist.” She was
very adamant on her book being a “speculative fiction” rather than science fiction, for she
sees science fiction as "filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like
that." Speculative fiction extrapolates current trends in society to present a speculative view
of the future. The novel does so as Handmaids Tale presents a view of future America by
presenting strong links of the presence of society’s increasingly permissive attitude towards
sex/sexuality and favoring political who believe in the repression and control of women’s
sexuality. This was relevant back then and it still is now.

“The Handmaids Tale” is difficult to compartmentalize because of the vast range of versatile
issues that could be differently interpreted by separate readers’. It encompasses many
different topics that Atwood studied from various trends she observed in the 1980s; poor
treatment of women, disease, infertility, and the corruption of religion. Like many other
speculative fiction, The Handmaid’s Tale began with the question “what if?” and Atwood
answered in an interview, “I guess I was tired of having people say, ‘It can’t happen here.’”
This suggests one of her purpose could be to spread awareness of something so brutal
occurring in different parts of the world throughout history and what that could escalate
into if it continues.
Word count: 998

https://www.lexico.com/definition/science_fiction

https://www.aresearchguide.com/handmaids-tale-biblical-references.html
https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/handmaid/setting/

https://devenlit12.wordpress.com/2012/09/19/the-handmaids-tale-genre-reading/

https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2019/sep/margaret-atwood-handmaids-tale-
testaments-real-life-inspiration/

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/14/margaret-atwood-road-to-ustopia