The Handmaid’s Tale:

Prediction of our Future  

Depiction of our Past and Present

In this essay, I will argue that Margaret Atwood has successfully used allusions to history and society today in The Handmaid’s Tale to demonstrate that rather than speculative fiction, this novel is a text based on real-life events and trends from our past and present.

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood has been widely perceived as a harrowing forecast of our potential future when it really represents our present and our past and the history of humanity. Nothing that happens in this novel hasn’t happened previously in real life. While Atwood brands the novel as dystopian, making her readers question their futures, if we read between the lines and take note of the allusions to our history and the real-world references that she weaves seamlessly into this story, we realise that the horrors of this novel are already ingrained into our past, and we begin to question the world that we know. The Handmaid’s Tale may be dystopian – a predicted future – but it is by no means fiction. This is rather a tale of the world that we already live in; and also a warning; of why we can’t let our past repeat itself.

“Everything that has happened in this text has happened before and there is nothing to say that it won’t happen again.”– Margaret Atwood.

The Handmaid’s Tale centres itself around Offred, a handmaid in Gilead: a near-future, totalitarian state in former America, which has been overthrown by an extremist Christian doctrine. As a handmaid, Offred serves one purpose; to reproduce. The world is facing a fertility crisis and the women who remain fertile are being distributed amongst Gilead’s elite families to bear their children. “We are two-legged wombs, that’s all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices.” As we, the readers, encounter the idea of women’s’ roles in society being reduced to child-bearing vessels, we are appalled at the thought as we live in a society the movement for women’s’ rights have progressed beyond this point, where we can designate our own futures and purposes as women. We think that Offred’s experiences are painful and “out of this world,” yet they are inspired by events in the world that we all live in. This theme of women’s worths being defined by their ability to reproduce alludes in many ways to Rachel and Jacob in the book of Genesis. The reference is made clear by the bible verse that opens the book: “And she said, Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her”. In the Biblical story, when Rachel is unable to have children she uses her maid Bilhah as a handmaid. Bilhah’s significance in the bible is relevant to the novel as she literally has none – she is mentioned once and her entire existence is narrowed down to her role as a handmaid for her superiors, just like Offred. “Give me children, or else I die. There’s more than one meaning to it.” – Offred is quoting Rachel: when Rachel famously said “give me children, or else I die,” the word die meant suffering the grief and anguish of not being able to conceive. When Offred says it, die means to literally die. If she fails to provide children, Gilead does not want her because if she isn’t fertile she is worthless. “I have viable ovaries. I have one more chance.”

In Gilead, women cannot vote, own land, have jobs or even be literate. This culture in the text reflects the way women have been oppressed for centuries and what life still looks like for women in some parts of the world today. A symbol of women’s oppression in the novel is the pen. “The pen between my fingers is sensuous, alive almost, I can feel its power, the power of the words it contains. Pen Is Envy, Aunt Lydia would say, quoting another centre motto, warning us away from such objects.”  In this quote, Atwood alludes to Sigmund Freud’s theory Penis Envy through a pun; “pen is envy.” The theory is based upon the concept that women and girls don’t feel jealousy towards people with penises, but rather the status that comes with having a penis and being a man, reflecting the divide between the genders and their separate opportunities. If you don’t have a penis, you don’t have rights is what Atwood is referring to by bringing Freud’s theory into the text. As a woman in Gilead, deprived of all models of literature, Offred envies the pen and the power of expression within it. By stripping women of their right to language in its written form, Gilead is furtherly controlling women’s consumption of knowledge: only the first generation of women in Gilead will actually be literate, and therefore the coming generations will be docile and submissive to the life that they are missing out. “[The Bible] is an incendiary device: who knows what we’d make of it if we ever got our hands on it?” This outlook is still very much alive today in various regions in Africa and in the Middle East where constitutions attempt to hinder girls from receiving an education: between 2007 and 2015 extremists attacked 867 schools in Pakistan because they educated girls. No wonder 130 million girls are being kept home from school. By conveying the deprivation of women’s right to literature in the Handmaid’s Tale, though alluding to Freud’s Penis Envy, for instance, Atwood is also conveying the deprivation of expression and knowledge that millions of women throughout time have suffered from. This is an issue focused on in the novel that we as readers can take outside the text and recognise in society around us, showing us that these issues are very much alive outside the novel, in reality.

Another major allusion to society that Atwood draws attention to in the Handmaid’s Tale is the widespread control of female sexuality by men. In Gilead, women are forced to cover up and hide their sexuality by the men that rule the system, the same men that indulge in nights out at Jezebel’s: a secret brothel for the leaders of the regime. The naming of the brothel is a clear allusion to the Jezebel in the Hebrew Bible, notorious for her reputation as a disgraceful seductress. She has been branded as “the whore of the Bible” and her name is connotated with shame for female sexual expression. This concept in the book is scarily similar to modern society and the history it stems from. It doesn’t need a pun or explanation for the women who are reading the test to recognise the satire that there is no middle ground in Gilead or in society: women have to be modest but they also have to be sexy. If women decide to cover up they are prudes but if they express any parts of their sexuality they are whores. Neither of these titles are compliments and you can only be one or the other: the lack of interface between the wives and the handmaids in Gilead and the women in Jezebel is a crying echo of reality. “I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it’s shameful or immodest but because I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to look at something that determines me so completely.”  The women in Gilead are forced to wear long dresses to conceal their skin and shape, just like many girls all over the world are forced to cover their bodies and even faces for religious purposes. This parallel between the text and reality can be extended to many elements of current society and history: Puritan England for instance, where it was obligatory to wear full-length dresses and head coverings just like handmaids. This culture of keeping our bodies concealed was established by men thousands of years ago who deemed that the female figure is shameful, a concept that comes through strongly in the novel, through the naming of Jezebel’s for instance. Simultaneously as men shame women for their sexuality, they are also the ones who crave it; today driving the sex trafficking and sex work industries. This universal issue is reflected in Gilead by the men who decided that women must be covered but bend their own rules as they visit Jezebel’s. Atwood drives this problematic element of modern society as well as ancient history forward in the text by reflecting a very real-world issue in Gilead. Atwood’s purpose here is to point out that this injustice lives beyond the text.

We read Margaret Atwood’s ideas throughout The Handmaid’s Tale in horror as we see the brutal injustices placed on the lives of women in Gilead, however, it doesn’t occur to us that things so grotesque live a life outside fiction until Atwood makes references to reality, recognisable to the reader. This story pains us as we relive Offred’s experiences through the text, we become uncomfortable and this is what Atwood wants us to feel. The cruel nature of this story leads us to believe that it is all simply “made up” but as we read between the lines and notice the historical examples and biblical allusions, we realise that this book is nothing more than the truth, a historical summary of the world that we live in, disguised as a 311 page horror story. While the dystopian nature of The Handmaid’s Tale is widely interpreted as a predicted future, I want to argue that this novel is a depiction of our past, which continues to haunt us to this present day. Above all, this story serves its purpose as a warning: if we can barely get through the discomfort and anguish of this story, how will we ever combat these issues face-to-face? What will we do?

“In the end, we all become stories.”