handmaid's tale book review new york times

The Handmaid’s Tale

By margaret atwood.

'The Handmaid’s Tale' has never been more popular than it is today. The novel was published in 1985 in Canada, but over the last several years, it has had a massive resurgence in popularity.

About the Book

Written by Emma Baldwin

B.A. in English, B.F.A. in Fine Art, and B.A. in Art Histories from East Carolina University.

This is primarily due to the fact that it was made into a Hulu Television series, prompting women, as well as men, from around the world to repurpose the symbols of oppression in the novel as ways of protest. 

The Handmaid’s Tale as a Dystopian Novel

Aside from its popularity with contemporary readers and television audiences, The Handmaid’s Tale is one of the best dystopian/speculative fiction novels ever written. It ranks among the likes of 1984 , We, and A Clockwork Orange. These novels all seek to convey something about human nature, something dark and twisted that overtakes the humanity’s better nature and leaves the world in a state of desperation whether that is a society’s need to feel safe, no matter the consequences for freedom or an overwhelming greed and anger that leads to personal destruction. 

But more importantly, what these novels, and others, have in common with The Handmaid’s Tale is a hope. That is, a hope that things could be different, that life might get better, or that someone, somewhere, will be willing to show kindness or mercy. Offred’s hope mostly comes from within, but also from her brief meetings with Ofglen, a member of the resistance group Mayday, and from her moments of peace with Nick. Her life as a Handmaid in Gilead is a twisted knot of fear mixed with a desperate desire to see her daughter again. 

Ceremony in The Handmaid’s Tale 

One of Atwood’s most powerful storytelling techniques is her ability to craft very real-seeming events and policies that outline this world’s structure. In order for a dystopian, futurist novel to work, readers must be convinced, at least to a point, that everything occurring is possible. Atwood understands this and looked to history, and specifically religion, to inform her choices.

It’s clear from the start of the novel that Gilead’s foundational principles come from a reading of the Old Testament . There are numerous references to stories from the Bible, characters, and practices. Atwood allowed in the history of female prosecution , specifically the Salem Witch Trials, to make the treatment of these women far more likely. 

But, what the novel depends on more than anything else is the reader’s understanding of the inherently sexist nature of our society. Those who dismiss the novel or the television show that followed it as impossible are likely not as tuned into the realities of the home, workplace, and the broader world for women as are those who see how possible it truly is.

There are countries around the world today where the practices of sexual slavery and the broader domination of women would seem commonplace. While at the same time , there are those in which politicians and religious leaders are seeking to implement policies that would erode women’s rights for generations. The Handmaid’s Tale , just like 1984 and A Brave New World, is a warning. 

The Past and Present in The Handmaid’s Tale

The novel is structured in two vaguely defined sections . One, which is commonly known as the “night” section, focuses on Offred and how she is, as an individual, handling her life as a Handmaid. The other section is broader. It taps into the wider world of Gilead and the struggles of all the Handmaids in Offred’s circle. In both of these sections of Offred’s story, she jumps around in time. Through a series of remarkably poignant flashbacks, she tells her story.

Atwood made a choice to provide these as a series of scenes rather than as a cohesive look at who Offred used to be. But, even at the end of the novel, there is still so much that’s a mystery. While in some novels this might leave the reader disappointed, in the case of The Handmaid’s Tale, readers, or at least this reader, was left wondering, thinking for days after about who Offred was and the lives of the other Handmaid’s used to live. 

One of the most noteworthy details that’s left out of the novel is the protagonist’s true name. Offred is a disturbing combination of the word “Of” and her commander’s first name, “Fred.” This is just one of the many creatively terrifying ways that Atwood confirms for the reader the Handmaid’s (almost) total domination by the men in Gilead. Each woman around Offred shares a different part of herself for the story. Some do share their names, others share their fears, and one Handmaid, in particular, shares her determination to do something about their situation. Offred goes back and forth between wanting to risk her life to destroy Gilead while at the same time wanting to do everything she can just to find her daughter. 

The Future in The Handmaid’s Tale

Offred’s future is one of the most curious parts of the novel. Atwood concludes the story by whisking Offred off in a car with either members of the residence or Eyes or have come to execute and/or torture her. This is just anther part of OFfred’s story that’s up to the reader to interpret. Does The Handmaid’s Tale have a happy ending? Was Offred affection and trust of Nick completely misplaced?

One of the most curious and somewhat disconcerting sections of The Handmaid’s Tale comes at the end of Offred’s story after what seems like the end of the novel. Atwood jumps into the future while at the same time revealing that Gilead does eventually collapse. The readers find themselves in a classroom, listening to a lecture on Offred’s life and Gilead from a Professor named Piexito. But, what quickly becomes clear is that not everything has changed. Gilead might’ve collapsed, but the opinions that allowed it to exist in the first place are still around. This is a thoughtful conclusion to the book, although one that takes away, at least on a first reading, from the powerful mystery of Offred’s escape or capture. 

The Handmaid's Tale Book Review: Atwood's Dystopian Masterpiece

• Writing Style
• Lasting Effect on Reader

The Handmaid's Tale Review

The Handmaid’s Tale  is a classic of the dystopian and speculative fiction genres. It is generally considered to be Margaret Atwood’s masterpiece, one that has resonated throughout the decades since it was written. Readers come away from  The Handmaid’s Tale,  chilled by the depictions of violence and abuse within Atwood’s fictional world, Gilead. But, the novel also leaves readers with the hope that things are going to change for the main character and the broader world, she is forced to inhabit. 

• Terrifyingly realistic depiction of a totalitarian theocracy
• Creative and impactful writing style and use of flashbacks. 
• The right balance of mystery and certainty. 
• Undefined conclusion that leaves readers unsure of what happens to the main character. 
• Lack of description in regards to what’s happening in other parts of the United States. 
• Readers who are sensitive to subjects like mental and physical abuse may have trouble reading the novel. 

About Emma Baldwin

Emma Baldwin, a graduate of East Carolina University, has a deep-rooted passion for literature. She serves as a key contributor to the Book Analysis team with years of experience.

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood has written numerous novels, essays, collections of poetry, and even graphic novels.  She is considered to be one of Canada’s best and most popular writers.

Atwood Facts

Explore ten of the most interesting facts about Atwood's life, habits, and passions.

Atwood's Best Books

Explore the ten best books Atwood wrote.

Atwood, the Feminist and Enviromentalist

When you say the name “Margaret Atwood,” it is likely that images of women in red gowns and white bonnets and the near future come to mind.

The canoe glides, carrying the two of us, around past the leaning trees . . . The direction is clear, I see I’ve been planning this, for how long I can’t tell. Margaret Atwood

Cite This Page

Baldwin, Emma " The Handmaid’s Tale Review ⭐ " Book Analysis , https://bookanalysis.com/margaret-atwood/the-handmaids-tale/review/ . Accessed 3 April 2024.

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Margaret Atwood Expands the World of “The Handmaid’s Tale”

By Jia Tolentino

The political deployment of imagery from Margaret Atwood’s novel “ The Handmaid’s Tale ” began in Texas, in the spring of 2017, at a protest against the state’s ongoing campaign to restrict abortion rights. The TV adaptation of the book would soon begin streaming, on Hulu. The show stars Elisabeth Moss as the novel’s narrator and protagonist, Offred, a woman stripped of her job, her family, and her name in a near-future American theocracy called Gilead. Offred is a Handmaid, forced to live as a breeding concubine; each month, she is ceremonially raped by her Commander, a man of high status, in the interest of rebuilding a population that has dwindled owing to secular immorality, environmental toxicity, and super-S.T.D.s. Like all Handmaids, she wears a scarlet dress, a long cloak, and a face-obscuring white bonnet, a uniform that Atwood based, in part, on the woman on the label of Old Dutch Cleanser, an image that had scared her as a child.

Women wore this uniform to the protest in Texas, and they have since worn it to protests in England, Ireland, Argentina, Croatia, and elsewhere. When “The Handmaid’s Tale” was published, in 1985, some reviewers found Atwood’s dystopia to be poetically rich but implausible. Three decades later, the book is most often described with reference to its timeliness. The current President has bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy,” and the Vice-President is a man who, as governor of Indiana, signed a law that required fetal remains of miscarriages and abortions, at any stage of pregnancy, to be cremated or buried. This year, half a dozen states have passed legislation banning abortion after around six weeks; Alabama passed a law that would ban abortion in nearly all circumstances, including cases involving rape or incest. (All these laws have yet to take effect.)

At first, I found it moving to see women at protests in Handmaid garb. Sometimes they carried signs with the dog-Latin phrase “ Nolite te bastardes carborundorum ,” which, in Atwood’s novel, is scribbled in Offred’s closet, a message from a previous Handmaid: Don’t let the bastards grind you down. The costumes could be read as an expression of inter-class solidarity: women with the time and the resources to protest tend not to be those who suffer first when reproductive rights are restricted, but the former were saying, on behalf of the latter, that they would fight for us all.

Only a portion of the women in Gilead are Handmaids; others are Marthas, who cook and clean, or Aunts, who indoctrinate other women into the life style of subjugation, or Wives, obedient trophies who smile graciously while other women do all the work. But the novel confines you within Offred’s perspective—it suggests, even demands, identification with the Handmaids. The TV show, with its lush cinematography and its sumptuous art direction and its decision to have Moss say things like “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum, bitches ,” turned this suggestion, perhaps inevitably, into a marketing angle: we are all Handmaids. It has reinvented the subdued Offred of the novel as the destructive, mesmerizing, apparently unbreakable June. (That’s the name Offred had before Gilead—though, in Atwood’s original conception, Offred’s real name had disappeared.)

As the show became popular, and the iconography spread, its meaning became diffuse. The Handmaid seemed to evolve from a symbol of advocacy for victims into a way of playacting victimhood. Women were buying red cloaks and white bonnets on Amazon, leaving four- and five-star reviews with tongue-in-cheek Gilead greetings. “Blessed be the fruit,” one customer wrote, noting that she “got lots of compliments.” Another review: “Perfect. Can’t wait for Halloween!” M-G-M, which produces the TV adaptation, briefly attempted to sell a line of Handmaid-themed wine. The twenty-two-year-old billionaire cosmetics entrepreneur Kylie Jenner threw a “Handmaid’s Tale”-themed party for her best friend’s birthday. An instinct toward solidarity had been twisted into what seemed like a private fantasy of persecution that could flatten all differences among women—a vision of terrible equality, which, in an era when minute gradations of power are analyzed constantly, could induce a secret thrill.

Sometimes I found myself wondering how many of the women indulging this fantasy would, in some future real-life Gilead, become not Handmaids but Wives. This was, it turns out, not only a judgmental thought but a simplistic one. Atwood has now written a sequel, “ The Testaments ” (Nan A. Talese), set fifteen years after the first book ends. The new novel, like its predecessor, is presented as a story assembled from historical artifacts, with an epilogue that depicts a twenty-second-century academic conference about Gilead. But, in “The Testaments,” Handmaids and Wives hardly enter the picture at all. Instead, it is about the Aunts, and three of them in particular: one whom we already know from the first book, and who, we learn, helped to establish Gilead’s shadow matriarchy, within a thicket of rapists; one who was raised inside Gilead, and who grew up devout and illiterate and expecting to be married by the age of fourteen; and one who is sent to Gilead, as a teen-ager, by the resistance, which is based in Canada, and which carries out reconnaissance missions and helps citizens of Gilead to escape.

The book may surprise readers who wondered, when the sequel was announced, whether Atwood was making a mistake in returning to her earlier work. She has said that “The Testaments” was inspired by readers’ questions about the inner workings of Gilead, and also by “the world we’ve been living in.” But it seems to have another aim as well: to help us see more clearly the kinds of complicity required for constructing a world like the one she had already imagined, and the world we fear our own might become.

Atwood, who was born in Ottawa in 1939, has been the most famous Canadian author for decades. She published her first book, a collection of poems, in 1961, and has since written, among other things, seventeen novels, sixteen poetry collections, ten works of nonfiction, eight short-story collections, and seven children’s books. As a novelist, she has a wide tonal range, moving from sarcasm to solemnity, austerity to playfulness; she can toggle between extremes of subtlety and unsubtlety from book to book. In her “MaddAddam” trilogy, begun in the early two-thousands and set in a near-future world where overpopulation leads society to reduce everything to its base functionality, Atwood takes aim at technocracy and corporate control: people eat “ChickieNobs,” the product of genetically engineered chickens that consist of a mouth surrounded by twenty breast-meat tubes; the Crakers, a humanoid race designed for a minimum of trouble and a maximum of efficiency, have giant penises that turn blue when the females of the species are in heat. “Cat’s Eye,” on the other hand, which was published in 1988, is a quiet study of the ways that women and girls are gently and devastatingly cruel to one another. I reread it recently, and felt a sensation I associate with reading Atwood: nothing was really happening, but I was riveted, and fearful, as if someone were showing me footage of a car crash one frame at a time.

Atwood’s best novels bring to bear a psychologist’s grasp of deep, interior forces and a mad scientist’s knack for conceptual experiments that can draw these forces out into the open. “The Blind Assassin,” published in 2000, does this: a novel about two sisters growing up in rural Ontario, it contains a novel-within-the-novel, which itself contains another novel, a science-fiction story set on a planet called Zycron. So does “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which had become required reading by the time I bought it for an English class in college. I was acquainted with theocracy, and the sick appeal of female subservience: I had grown up Baptist in Texas, with the idea that girls should consecrate their bodies for God and for their future husbands. At the religious school that I attended for twelve years, we regularly stood and pledged allegiance to the American flag, the Christian flag (white, with a red cross on a blue canton), and the Bible. In this context, Gilead seemed a little effortful: you didn’t need to rename the butcher shop All Flesh and rebrand rape as a supervised monthly ceremony in order to bend a society to someone’s bad idea of God’s will. But, such broad strokes aside, the novel is characterized by remarkable patience and restraint. Coming across the book’s offhand mention that oranges have been scarce “since Central America was lost to the Libertheos,” you can spend twenty pages wondering about Gilead’s import-export structure—and, all the while, the existential diminishment of the utterly ordinary Offred is quietly lighting you on fire.

Christianity and white supremacy are intertwined and foundational ideas in America, and, in the novel, Jews who refuse to convert are shipped off to Israel, while the “Children of Ham” are resettled in the Midwest. The precedent of slavery in the conception of Gilead, which is alluded to in the epilogue of “The Handmaid’s Tale” and acknowledged by Atwood in an introduction to a recent edition, has been consistently underplayed in the book’s reception. In the TV adaptation, in a seeming attempt at deference to contemporary concerns about representation, Gilead is uneasily and halfheartedly post-racial; Moira, June’s best friend, who is also a Handmaid, is played by Samira Wiley, who is black. The show depicts a purity-obsessed society in which the powerful—who are all white in the book, and virtually all white on the show—mostly don’t care about having white children, or maintaining the appearance of “pure” lineage. Atwood is a producer on the show, and she has noted that racial dynamics have changed since she wrote the book. Bruce Miller, the adaptation’s showrunner, has said that he saw little difference between “making a TV show about racism and making a racist TV show.” That’s an odd line to draw, given the series’ willingness—its requirement and mission, really—to be unpleasant. Season 3 features a scene in which June has to patiently persuade her new Commander to rape her. The difference between making a TV show about female punishment and making a TV show that punishes women may also be smaller than Miller thought.

The adaptation has moved well past where the novel ends. According to Hulu, viewership increased seventy-six per cent between Seasons 1 and 2, and forty per cent between Seasons 2 and 3. The show has dragged out Offred’s plight beyond all reason—Season 3 takes place some five years after the rise of Gilead, and Season 4 is in the works—while taking a tremendously long time to provide details about how, precisely, Gilead was established and, later, destabilized. Learning such things is one of the only possible upsides, to my mind, of staying in this world beyond the condensed period required for reading a novel. How was Gilead’s freaky nomenclature decided on? Aren’t Gileadeans worried about incest, since kids rarely know who their real parents are?

“The Testaments” addresses these and other questions in sidelong mentions, which help to make more concrete a world that, in the first novel—partly because of Offred’s fiercely enforced ignorance—felt abstract, like a landscape obscured by fog. (The publisher has emphasized that “The Testaments” is “not connected” to the TV show, though certain plot elements overlap.) We learn that four founding Aunts invented “laws, uniforms, slogans, hymns, names” for Gilead, and allowed the Commanders to take credit. They maintain a genealogical registry that records both the official and unofficial parentage of each child. They have begun to send Aunts-in-training to Canada, to recruit women as replacements for the steady stream of female refugees flowing out of Gilead. (In the sequel, as in the TV adaptation, the sharpest contemporary resonances are with the plight of asylum seekers at the southern U.S. border.)

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The four founding Aunts are Vidala, Helena, Elizabeth, and Lydia—the last of whom is the central character in “The Testaments.” Formerly a judge, she once presided over cases about expanded rights for sex workers; she briefly volunteered at a rape crisis center. (In the TV show, she is a former schoolteacher with a background in family law.) Aunt Helena was a P.R. executive for a high-end lingerie company; Aunt Elizabeth was a Vassar-educated executive assistant to a female senator. Only Aunt Vidala was a true believer, working for Gilead before it overthrew the U.S. government. The rest were rounded up at gunpoint, along with all other women of post-childbearing age and high professional status, and taken to a stadium that had been repurposed as a prison. “Some of us were past menopause, but others were not, so the smell of clotting blood was added to the sweat and tears and shit and puke,” Aunt Lydia recalls. “To breathe was to be nauseated. They were reducing us to animals—to penned-up animals—to our animal nature. They were rubbing our noses in that nature. We were to consider ourselves subhuman.”

Confined in this torture chamber, Aunt Lydia finds it ridiculous that she’d “believed all that claptrap about life, liberty, democracy, and the rights of the individual I’d soaked up at law school.” One day, she’s thrown into an isolation cell, beaten, and Tasered. Tears pour out of her eyes, and yet, she writes, a third eye in her forehead regards the situation, as cold as a stone. “Behind it someone was thinking: I will get you back for this. I don’t care how long it takes or how much shit I have to eat in the meantime, but I will do it .” She is taken to a hotel room, where, after three days of recuperation, she finds a brown dress waiting for her—a dress she’s seen on the women, future Aunts, who have been ceremonially shooting other women in the stadium as a way of proving their loyalty. She puts it on, picks up a gun, and passes the test. When a Commander assembles the founding Aunts in his office and tells them that he wants them to “organize the separate sphere—the sphere for women,” Aunt Lydia tells him that such a female sphere must be “truly separate.” She understands that this is her chance to establish a part of Gilead that will be free from interference or questioning by men.

She does not do this out of feminist instinct: she’s seeking a structure that will permit her to acquire leverage over as many people as possible. By the time she begins writing the account that constitutes her portion of “The Testaments,” she has amassed enough power to act like a free agent. “Did I hate the structure we were concocting?” she writes. “On some level, yes: it was a betrayal of everything we’d been taught in our former lives, and of all that we’d achieved. Was I proud of what we managed to accomplish, despite the limitations? Also, on some level, yes.”

It’s not exactly plausible that Aunt Lydia has been waiting all this time to join the resistance. But her story functions as a parable: the tale of a woman who, in trying to save herself, erects the regime that ruins her. “The Testaments” is the story of her excruciatingly belated turn away from Gilead—of the final days of her plan to bring down the empire, which draws in the other two narrators and relies on their willingness to put their lives on the line. No one but Aunt Lydia, who has been weaving a network of strings to be pulled at her pleasure, could undermine Gilead so effectively. Still, her actions are not presented as redemptive. “What good is it to throw yourself in front of a steamroller out of moral principles and then be crushed flat like a sock emptied of its foot?” she’d once told herself. She is a vortex of ambiguity, pragmatism, and self-interest—the true literary protagonist of Atwood’s Gilead. “Making poison is as much fun as making a cake,” Atwood once wrote, in a short story. “People like to make poison. If you don’t understand this you will never understand anything.”

One of the oddest things about watching the Handmaid become a figure as much a part of the Zeitgeist as Rosie the Riveter—whom one character in “The Testaments” describes as a woman “flexing her biceps to show that women could make bombs”—is seeing Gilead transform, in the journey from novel to television show, from a niche world that commanded mainstream interest into a mainstream phenomenon that seems to target a shrinking niche. On the show, the couple who imprison Offred as their Handmaid, Commander Waterford and his wife, Serena, are played by attractive actors in their forties and thirties, respectively. I’m not sure what is gained—other than, perhaps, additional viewers—by transforming them into sexy rapists. I also don’t quite grasp who benefits from the sight of a pack of Handmaids strutting in slow motion, fresh off the victory of having resisted orders to kill one of their own in a public stoning, their red skirts swaying to the tune of Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good.”

Precisely who is being addressed is a crucial and carefully considered matter in the novel. Offred writes to a nebulous “you” that sometimes feels like God, sometimes like her husband, sometimes like a figure she’s invented to keep her from believing that she’s already dead. In the academic symposium that serves as a coda to the novel, Atwood plants a reminder of how inevitable it is that we would interpret Offred’s story in a way that serves our own interests. Delivering the keynote speech, Professor James Darcy Pieixoto—after calling Gilead’s escape network, known as the Underground Femaleroad, the “Underground Frailroad”—urges his audience to “be cautious about passing moral judgment upon the Gileadeans. . . . Our job is not to censure but to understand.”

“The Testaments” ends with another speech from Professor Pieixoto, at a symposium held two years after the one in “The Handmaid’s Tale.” He’s introduced, as he was in the first book, by Professor Maryanne Crescent Moon, and her words lightly nod to the mania for Handmaid costumes: Moon tells her fellow-academics about a planned Gilead reënactment, but advises them “not to get carried away.” Pieixoto then begins his talk by noting the changed cultural climate, in which “women are usurping leadership positions to such a terrifying extent,” and hopes that his “little jokes” from the previous symposium will not be held against him. Gilead Studies has become surprisingly popular: “Those of us who have laboured in the dim and obscure corners of academe for so long are not used to the bewildering glare of the limelight,” he says. “The Handmaid’s Tale” has long been canonical, but it was once a novel. It is now an idea that is asked to support and transubstantiate the weight of our time.

The other narrators of “The Testaments” are girls who have no knowledge of life before the existence of Gilead. They speak in a manner that suggests that they have made it to a safe place, with a sympathetic listener—which feels like an act of generosity, or political encouragement, on Atwood’s part. Agnes, the older of the two, grew up in a Commander’s family, and recounts her childhood with sadness and a trace of longing, explaining the way that being trained into subservience can feel like being honored, and blessed. “We were custodians of an invaluable treasure that existed, unseen, inside us,” she remembers. “We were precious flowers that had to be kept safely inside glass houses, or else we would be ambushed and our petals would be torn off and our treasure would be stolen and we would be ripped apart and trampled by the ravenous men who might lurk around any corner, out there in the wide sharp-edged sin-ridden world.” She remembers her mother, Tabitha, singing a song about angels watching over her bed—which made her think not about wings and feathers but about Gilead’s Angels, the men in black uniforms with guns. Tabitha asks her, Isn’t it wonderful to be so cherished? “What could I say but yes and yes?” Agnes says. “Yes, I was happy. Yes, I was lucky. Anyway it was true.”

Agnes has a secret identity, which viewers of the TV show will grasp right away. Readers who haven’t seen the show will catch on fairly quickly. The same is true for the other narrator. She is called Daisy when she is in Canada and goes by Jade after she is smuggled into Gilead, but her real name is suggested early on in her portion of the narrative, when she rants about Baby Nicole, the child of a Handmaid and a Commander who became a national figure after her mother smuggled her into Canada and disappeared. (Baby Nicole, a sort of hybrid of Elián González and JonBenét Ramsey, features prominently in Seasons 2 and 3 of the show, though her story plays out somewhat differently there.) “I’d basically disliked Baby Nicole since I’d had to do a paper on her,” Jade says. “I’d got a C because I’d said she was being used as a football by both sides, and it would be the greatest happiness of the greatest number just to give her back.”

Aunt Lydia has Gilead wired; she knows how to get Baby Nicole back into the country, and she knows how to get her out again. Like Offred in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” she is addressing an unknown audience—at least, until the end of her story, when she begins speaking to the reader in a way that made me shiver: for the first time in Gilead, Atwood was writing through a character who’d drawn an arrow and shot it straight across the divide. “I picture you as a young woman, bright, ambitious,” Aunt Lydia writes, as the end approaches. “You’ll be looking to make a niche for yourself in whatever dim, echoing caverns of academia may still exist by your time. I situate you at your desk, your hair tucked back behind your ears, your nail polish chipped—for nail polish will have returned, it always does. You’re frowning slightly, a habit that will increase as you age.”

She goes on, “How can I have behaved so badly, so cruelly, so stupidly? you will ask. You yourself would never have done such things! But you yourself will never have had to.” The breakthrough of “The Testaments” lies here, in the way it solves a problem that “The Handmaid’s Tale” created. We were all so busy imagining ourselves as Handmaids that we failed to see that we might be Aunts—that we, too, might feel, at the culmination of a disaster we created through our own pragmatic indifference, that we had no real choice, that we were just aiming for survival, that we were doing what anyone would do. ♦

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By Rebecca Mead

By Emily Nussbaum

By Inkoo Kang

March 7, 1990 Review/Film; 'Handmaid's Tale,' Adapted From Atwood Novel By JANET MASLIN he Handmaid's Tale'' is that rare totalitarian fantasy in which the tyrants plant tulips and wear pearls. The United States, now renamed Gilead, has become a male-controlled police state dedicated to the oppression of women, yet there are very few men in either Margaret Atwood's novel or Volker Schlondorff's film version. The men are either roaming the corridors of power, fighting as soldiers called Angels, or (if they are nonwhite) relegated to far-flung colonies in badly polluted parts of the world. So for the most part, it is only the women we see. Women called Aunts, dressed in high heels and loose, demure brown outfits that would have been just right for office jobs in the days when women were still allowed to hold them, are now in charge of teaching moral pieties and laying down the law. Women called Wives wear an overpowering shade of blue and preside over large houses in the suburbs. Women called Marthas, in gray-green maids' uniforms, keep these houses running smoothly. Women called Handmaids dress in red and have been robbed of all rights, reduced to only two basic functions: breeding babies (because pollution has rendered most other women barren) and buying groceries. Relations between these castes are somewhat rocky, and for good reason. The officially sanctioned ceremony in which a Commander, his Wife and his Handmaid all collaborate in the attempt to create babies, with the greatest solemnity and with virtually all of their color-coded clothes on, is bound to rattle a few nerves. So are the garden-party festivities that surround the birth of children. These infants are immediately removed from the Handmaids who bore them and turned over to clusters of cooing Wives, as genteel dance music tootles away in the background. As visions of a hellish, dehumanizing future go, this one could never be mistaken for a man's. With its devilish attention to polite little touches, its abundant bitchiness, its decrying of the Handmaids' oppression along with its tacit celebration of their fecundity, ''The Handmaid's Tale'' is a shrewd if preposterous cautionary tale that strikes a wide range of resonant chords. Male supremacy, pollution of the planet and the political power of the religious right have all combined to set Ms. Atwood's worst nightmares in motion, and what keeps them moving is her thoroughness and attention to small details. Should one step back from this story, its elements of masochism and misogyny become unmistakable, but at close range they help to keep the drama moving. And Mr. Schlondorff, not known for a light touch, has come a surprisingly long way toward making the film version work strictly on the level of popular entertainment. ''The Handmaid's Tale,'' has among its virtues a clear and insidious visual scheme, an eerie score by Ryuichi Sakamoto, a screenplay by Harold Pinter that efficiently compresses the story and heightens its tensions by removing certain antecedents, and conceptual advice from the artist Jennifer Bartlett that helps underscore the material's basic ironies. The film presents a comfortable, traditional-looking, museum-quality suburban universe in which all of life's truly stabilizing elements are gone. Natasha Richardson, speaking in another flat, toneless American accent but enlivening it with her throaty purr, plays a woman named Kate who loses her husband and daughter at the beginning of the story. Relegated to Handmaid status, she is assigned to the home of a military Commander (Robert Duvall), who seems not a bad sort despite his masculine superiority, and his insinuating Wife (Faye Dunaway), who clearly rules the roost. Though the film regards the Commander as Kate's class enemy and forces her into a contrived act of rebellion at the story's end, it also allows her a convivial friendship with her oppressor. Also on the premises is Nick (Aidan Quinn), the chauffeur who rekindles Kate's warmer feelings and helps her to succeed in fulfilling the Handmaid's highest duty. Typically, Mr. Schlondorff makes Nick the first thing audiences see at the Commander's establishment, but this sort of foreshadowing is used coolly and effectively throughout the film. Its carefully designed look is hugely effective; less so is Kate's own story, since this heroine is essentially so passive and, at times, so dull. Ms. Richardson, alert and receptive as she is, often has little more to do than stand by and watch blankly as others impose their will on her. (In Ms. Atwood's novel, Kate is much less naive, and there's a lot more tension to her restraint.) A number of the supporting performances work wonders at cutting the ice, particularly Elizabeth McGovern's as Kate's feisty, rebellious friend, and Ms. Dunaway, who makes a magnificently coy and dangerous Wife. David Dukes makes a brief, lively appearance as a doctor who's far too eager to be of help. Mr. Duvall is particularly good, seeming warm, kindly and, despite dialogue to the contrary, hardly the sort who can comfortably regard others as slaves. The film's ending, an attempt to spur Kate into action by holding the Commander accountable for a legion of woes, is a mistake. Return to the Books Home Page

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THE HANDMAID'S TALE

by Margaret Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 1985

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.

Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.

Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985

ISBN: 038549081X

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

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NORMAL PEOPLE

by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!

Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends , in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.

Pub Date: April 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

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by Sally Rooney

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The Best Fiction Books » Contemporary Fiction

The handmaid's tale, by margaret atwood.

Published in 1986,  The Handmaid’s Tale is a haunting epistolary novel narrated by Offred, a woman living in a future America where environmental and societal breakdown have led to the establishment of a fundamentalist Christian theocracy. In Gilead, women have been stripped of their fundamental rights and reduced to their reproductive potential. Lesbians and other ‘gender outlaws’ are executed, as are doctors who conduct abortions.

The Handmaid’s Tale was recognised as a modern classic and first adapted into a film in 1990. It reappeared in the headlines (and the bestseller lists) in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s US electoral victory, after which time the handmaid’s bonnet became an icon of the feminist protest movement. More recently it was adapted as a multi-Emmy Award-winning television series starring Elisabeth Moss, who also narrates the audiobook of The Handmaid’s Tale .

The sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale is  The Testaments, set 15 years later.

Recommendations from our site

“Atwood takes all the hard information about gender inequality that she sees around her and then turns it up a few notches.” Read more...

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Catherine Mayer , Politician

The Handmaid’s Tale  was adapted as a multi-Emmy Award-winning television series starring Elisabeth Moss, who also narrates the audiobook .

Narrators: Elisabeth Moss, Bradley Whitford, Amy Landecker, Ann Dowd

Length: 11 hours and 22 minutes

Great Actors Read Great Books

The book, according to the author

The Handmaid’s Tale has not been out of print since it was first published, back in 1985. It has sold millions of copies worldwide and has appeared in a bewildering number of translations and editions. It has become a sort of tag for those writing about shifts towards policies aimed at controlling women, and especially women’s bodies and reproductive functions: “Like something out of The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Here comes The Handmaid’s Tale” have become familiar phrases… The book came out in the UK in February of 1986, and in the United States at the same time. In the UK, which had had its Oliver Cromwell moment some centuries ago and was in no mood to repeat it, the reaction was along the lines of, Jolly good yarn. In the United States, however…it was more likely to be, How long have we got?

Margaret Atwood

When it debuted in 1985, Atwood even took newspaper clips to her interviews about the book to show her plot points’ real-life antecedents. The book mirrored the United States’ embrace of conservatism, as evidenced by the election of Ronald Reagan as president, as well as the increasing power of the Christian right and its powerful lobbying organisations the Moral Majority, Focus on the Family and the Christian Coalition – not to mention the rise of televangelism.

Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, BBC Culture. 25 April 2018.

The world of 1984 has never existed. Neither has the one of Brave New World, or A Clockwork Orange, or any of the other dystopias that are supposed to tell us about the human condition. But all you have to do to recreate The Handmaid’s Tale is go back a few hundred years or move to the right country. A paranoid, in this case, is just a woman in possession of all the facts.

Adi Robertson, The Verge. 9 Nov 2016

The new world of ”The Handmaid’s Tale” is a woman’s world, even though governed, seemingly, and policed by men. Its ethos is entirely domestic, its female population is divided into classes based on household functions, each class clad in a separate color that instantly identifies the wearer – dull green for the Marthas (houseworkers); blue for the Wives; red, blue and green stripes for the Econowives (working class); red for the Handmaids (whose function is to bear children to the head of the household, like Bilhah, Rachel’s handmaid in Genesis, but who also, in their long red gowns and white wimple-like headgear, have something of the aura of a temple harlot); brown for the Aunts (a thought-control force, part-governess, part-reform-school matron). The head of the household – whose first name the handmaid takes, adding the word ”of” to show possession -”Offred,” ”Ofwarren” – is known as the Commander. It is his duty to inseminate his assigned partner, who lies on the spread thighs of his wife.

Mary McCarthy, reviewing the first edition in The New York Times, 9 February 1986.

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The testaments: a novel by margaret atwood, the penelopiad by margaret atwood, alias grace by margaret atwood, angel catbird by johnnie christmas, margaret atwood & tamra bonvillain, cat's eye by margaret atwood, oryx and crake by margaret atwood, more books like the handmaid's tale.

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• Entertainment
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Review: ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is a terrifying story of a future that looks like the past

The Hulu series, based on the 1985 Margaret Atwood novel, is a cautionary tale, a story of resistance and a work of impeccable world-building. It is unflinching, vital and scary as hell.

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A decade ago, Elisabeth Moss began co-starring in “Mad Men,” which among other things was about how women were objectified and subjugated — in the past, the 1960s, the bad old days.

In Hulu’s spectacular “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Moss is Offred, a baby-making slave in the Republic of Gilead, which is what part of the United States (New England, roughly) has become after a fertility crisis and a theocratic coup. It’s set in a near future that looks like the 1600s.

“Mad Men” may have resonated with today, but it gave viewers the comfortable vantage of history, the reassurance that we had come a long way, baby. “The Handmaid’s Tale” argues — with an assist from current events — that progress is neither automatic nor irreversible.

‘The Handmaid’s Tale’

When: Starts streaming Wednesday, April 26, on Hulu

“The Handmaid’s Tale,” based on the 1985 Margaret Atwood novel, is a cautionary tale, a story of resistance and a work of impeccable world-building. It is unflinching, vital and scary as hell.

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Offred had another name before she was seized as breeding stock, her husband killed and her young daughter taken by the state. Now she’s identified as the property of her “commander,” Fred Waterford (Joseph Fiennes). The name is a loaner. If Offred disappoints, she’ll be exiled to clean up radioactive waste with other “unwomen” until she dies, and another woman will be “of Fred.”

Her days are spent running errands in a commissary where the goods are labeled with pictures (because women should not read), or sitting quietly in a bedroom with shatterproof windows (so she can’t slash her wrists with a shard of glass). On “ceremony” nights, she mechanically copulates with the Commander while lying in the lap of his infertile wife, Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski).

The ritual, borrowed from the biblical story of Bilhah and Rachel, emphasizes that Offred is nothing more than a womb. So does her uniform: her face hidden by a bonnet, her form draped in a dress the red of menstrual blood and childbirth. (The costume design, by Ane Crabtree, is almost a character in itself.)

This is a dark story. That it’s not oppressive is a testament to the deft adaptation and, especially, Moss’ layered performance.

Offred is a captive. Nevertheless, she persists. She keeps a spark of self cupped in her hands. The series relies heavily on her narration, but not just for exposition. It’s how we hear her true voice, defiant, spirited, even mordantly funny. Passing the hooded bodies of three men hanged by the government — a priest, a doctor and a gay man — she comments: “I think I heard that joke once. This wasn’t the punch line.”

In the first three episodes — which debut Wednesday, April 26, with new ones weekly thereafter — the showrunner, Bruce Miller, is faithful to the novel while expanding on it. (Hulu plans this as a continuing series, so it will presumably stray further eventually. Atwood is a consulting producer.)

You might guess that the producers had added certain on-the-nose details to be topical: refugees fleeing for Canada; Gilead’s leaders leveraging fear of Islamic terrorists; feminist street protests before the regime’s crackdown. That’s all in the novel.

I hate to say the story is newly relevant, as if it weren’t for three decades. But face it: When you have a president who talks about women as if they were squeeze toys, who implied a tough female journalist was on her period, whose administration gathered a roomful of male politicians to discuss women’s health coverage — well, the viral marketing takes care of itself.

Gilead is a tyranny of nostalgia, a rape culture that denounces the previous society — ours — for degrading women with pornography. It controls women by elevating them, fetishizing motherhood, praising femininity, but defining it in terms of service to men and children.

Yet the most terrifying parts of “The Handmaid’s Tale” are the flashbacks, to a time very much like ours.

Before the coup, Offred has freedom, a job, Uber. Then things start to change — little things. Women are having trouble conceiving. The government becomes more reactionary. One day, a coffee shop clerk, unprovoked, calls her and her best friend, Moira (Samira Wiley), “sluts.”

Something primal and angry is awakening. Some people are exhilarated: Finally, they can say what’s on their minds, without the PC thought police cracking down! The show is also attentive to how progressive men can back-burner the concerns of women. Offred’s husband, Luke (O-T Fagbenle), for instance, is convinced that the craziness is bound to blow over.

It doesn’t. An intermediate layer of flashbacks finds Offred, Moira and a class of future handmaids at a re-education center being indoctrinated, with homilies and a cattle prod, by Aunt Lydia (a coolly imperious Ann Dowd). “This may not seem ordinary to you right now,” she tells them. “But after a time it will.”

The line is terrifying because it rings so true. You may not believe that anyone, in real life, is actually Making America Gilead Again. But this urgent “Handmaid’s Tale” is not about prophecy. It’s about process, the way people will themselves to believe the abnormal is normal, until one day they look around and realize that these are the bad old days.

Margaret Atwood Tried—and Failed—to Burn a Copy of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’ Here’s Why

A fireproof version of her bestseller is a weapon in an ongoing fight against literary censorship

Antonia Mufarech

Correspondent

First released in 1985, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale is a longtime bestseller… and a longtime object of censorship. The futuristic, dystopian novel about patriarchy run wild has long been one of the United States’ most-banned books—fodder for those who would censor or even burn its searing words.

Now, Atwood has partnered up with her publisher, Penguin Random House, to create a version of the book that’s impossible to ignite anything other than heated debate. It’s fireproof.

On Thursday, auction house Sotheby’s sold the unburnable book for $130,000. Proceeds will go to PEN America to support its advocacy for free expression and fight against book banning.

According to the group, The Handmaid’s Tale is a favorite scapegoat for those who would forbid books, and is often targeted for its sexual and health-related content.

“ The Handmaid's Tale has been banned many times—sometimes by whole countries, such as Portugal and Spain in the days of Salazar and the Francoists, sometimes by school boards, sometimes by libraries,” the Canadian author said in a statement .

In its recent report “ Banned in the USA ,” PEN documents 1,586 cases of a variety of reported book bans in the United States in 2021, spanning 26 states and 86 school districts. According to the report, a “disproportionate” number of bans target stories about people of color or LGBTQ+ people.

Out of all the bans listed, 98 percent deviated from “reconsideration” guidelines recommended by the American Library Association and the National Coalition Against Censorship , per PEN.

“It is not just the number of books removed that is disturbing, but the processes—or lack thereof—through which such removals are being carried out” that is cause for alarm, the group writes. The state with the greatest amount of book bans last year was Texas, with 713 prohibited books per the report, followed by Pennsylvania, Florida and Oklahoma. In 2021, Texas governor Greg Abbott requested school boards to discard books he referred to as "pornography," Sharif Paget and Nicole Chavez report for CNN .

Though Atwood’s novel has often faced bans itself, the group says it’s symbolic of an entire modern-day movement to stifle literary expression.

“In the face of a determined effort to censor and silence, this unburnable book is an emblem of our collective resolve to protect books, stories and ideas from those who fear and revile them,” PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel said in a statement .

The Handmaid’s Tale debuted to mixed reviews. But over the years, it has become a classic, touted by some as a frighteningly prescient prediction about the trajectory of American society. It depicts life in the Republic of Gilead, the repressive, totalitarian religious state that replaced the U.S. in a fictitious future, putting men in charge and relegating women to lives of subservience as sexually subjugated “handmaids.”

The book’s main character, wrote author Mary McCarthy in a 1986 review in the New York Times , has “an unwillingness to stick her neck out, and perhaps we are meant to conclude that such unwillingness, multiplied, may be fatal to a free society.” Since its publication, the book has been translated into over 40 languages, per a 2017 essay by Atwood in the Times .

Although it might look like an ordinary 384-page book, the fireproof edition is mostly made from Cinefoil, a specially treated aluminum foil, and contains other products such as fire-resistant inks and nickel wire. The technology—which protects the book even when heated to 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit—was designed by the creative agency Rethink and the graphic arts studio The Gas Company, Inc.

The 82-year-old author has published her works in more than 45 countries and has written over 50 books. Now, “The Handmaid’s Tale” is an award-winning TV series that can be streamed on Hulu .

In her 2017 essay in the Times , Atwood wrote that she is often asked if her bleak book is a prediction about where American society is headed. “Let’s say it’s an antiprediction: If this future can be described in detail, maybe it won’t happen,” she wrote. “But such wishful thinking cannot be depended on either.”

“I stopped writing [the novel] several times, because I considered it too far-fetched," she wrote for the  Atlantic   last month. “Silly me. Theocratic dictatorships do not lie only in the distant past: There are a number of them on the planet today. What is to prevent the United States from becoming one of them?”

In a launch video presenting the fireproof book, Atwood tries and fails to burn a prototype with a flamethrower. And she is just as evasive about the future of literary censorship.

“Let's hope we don't reach the stage of wholesale book burnings, as in Fahrenheit 451 ,” Atwood said in a statement referencing the classic Ray Bradbury novel. “But if we do, let's hope some books will prove unburnable—that they will travel underground, as prohibited books did in the Soviet Union.”

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Antonia Mufarech is a multimedia journalist whose work has been featured in the  Wall Street Journal , CNN en Español, HGTV, Food Network and  Vogue México y Latinoamérica . Read more of her work at  antoniamufarech.com .

What Critics Said About 'The Handmaid's Tale' Back In The 1980s

Books and Culture Writer, HuffPost

In 2017, Margaret Atwood is ascendant. The New Yorker has dubbed her the “ Prophet of Dystopia .” The upcoming Hulu adaptation of her most well-known book, the feminist speculative novel The Handmaid’s Tale , long in the works, has turned out to be almost ludicrously well-timed to the political moment. Atwood, who has also written chilling speculative fiction about other timely issues (such as climate change), seems prescient to rattled liberals in a post- Trump election world. Everyone wants her thoughts on what’s happening and what’s to come.

The media can be fickle, however. The Handmaid’s Tale has become an oft-studied and -cited modern classic, but its initial reception didn’t necessarily foretell its induction into the canon. The New Yorker, per a perusal of its archives from the time, didn’t review it at all; The New York Times published a sniffy takedown by Mary McCarthy . At the time, the Christian Science Monitor described the book as mostly well-received by critics; meanwhile, the San Francisco Chronicle suggested that reviews had been poor enough as to make Atwood “defensive” during an interview with the publication.

We dug through the archives to remember what critics were saying about The Handmaid’s Tale back in 1986, when it was published in the U.S., and we found everything from tepid reactions to outright pans to glowing odes. The concept of a dystopia premised on the theocratic oppression of women, perhaps unsurprisingly, has always been polarizing.

Below, check out a selection of the original reviews of The Handmaid’s Tale :

The Ecstatic:

“Just as the world of Orwell’s 1984 gripped our imaginations, so will the world of Atwood’s handmaid. She has succeeded in finding a voice for her heroine that is direct, artless, utterly convincing. It is the voice of a woman we might know, of someone very close to us. In fact, it is Offred’s poignant sense of time that gives this novel its peculiar power. The immense changes in her life have come so fast that she is still in a state of shock and disbelief as she relates to us what she sees around her.”

-Joyce Johnson, The Washington Post

“[A]mong other things, it is a political tract deploring nuclear energy, environmental waste, and antifeminist attitudes.

“But it so much more than that ― a taut thriller, a psychological study, a play on words. It has a sense of humor about itself, as well as an ambivalence toward even its worst villains, who aren’t revealed as such until the very end. Best of all, it holds out the possibility of redemption. After all, the Handmaid is also a writer. She has written this book. She may have survived.”

-Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

“Margaret Atwood’s cautionary tale of postfeminist future shock pictures a nation formed by a backlash against feminism, but also by nuclear accidents, chemical pollution, radiation poisoning, a host of our present problems run amok. Ms. Atwood draws as well on New England Puritan history for her repressive 22[n]d-century society. Her deft sardonic humor makes much of the action and dialogue in the novel funny and ominous at the same time.”

- NYT Editor’s Choice pick , 1986

“Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization ― this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest ― and long on cynicism ― it’s got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy’s Love In The Ruins . But the scariness is visceral, a world that’s like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence. Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.”

“Some details of Atwood’s bizarre anti-Utopia are at least as repellent as those in such forerunners as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in 1932 and George Orwell’s 1984 16 years later. Those two novels have come to be seen as fiercely moral tracts that jarred their readers to awaken them. Will Atwood, as different from Huxley and Orwell as they were from each other, join them in the accepted ranks of those disguised idealists who image the future as a nightmare in order that it may remain just that ― a fantasy? Certainly the early reviews of her book have been mainly positive.”

-Marilyn Gardner, The Christian Science Monitor

“Margaret Atwood’s new novel is being greeted as the long-awaited feminist dystopia and I am afraid that for some time it will be viewed as a test of the imaginative power of feminist paranoia [...] As a dystopia, this is a thinly textured one. [...] But if Offred is a sappy stand-in for Winston Smith, and Gilead seems at times to be only a coloring book version of Oceania, it may be because Atwood means to do more than scare us about the obvious consequences of a Falwellian coup d’état.”

-Barbara Ehrenreich, The New Republic

“[Atwood’s] regime is a hodgepodge: a theocracy that’s not recognizably Christian, that most Christians don’t accept; a repressive measure borrowed from South Africa; an atrocity adopted by the Romanians. With no unifying vision, the center doesn’t hold.”

-Alix Madrigal, The San Francisco Chronicle

“As a cautionary tale, Atwood’s novel lacks the direct, chilling plausibility of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World . It warns against too much: heedless sex, excessive morality, chemical and nuclear pollution. All of these may be worthwhile targets, but such a future seems more complicated than dramatic. But Offred’s narrative is fascinating in a way that transcends tense and time: the record of an observant soul struggling against a harsh, mysterious world.”

-Paul Gray, TIME

“ The Handmaid’s Tale is watchable, but it’s also paranoid poppycock — just like the book. The actors are imprisoned in Atwood’s grimly inhuman design. [...]

“What finally takes the cake for absurdity is a subplot featuring Aidan Quinn as Richardson’s handsome savior. It’s as if Atwood, after all that didactic scrubbing, couldn’t quite wash the princess fantasy out of her story. The Handmaid’s Tale is a tract that strives for sensitivity ― it lacks even the courage of its own misanthropy.”

-Owen Gleiberman, EW (on the 1990 film adaptation)

“The writing of The Handmaid’s Tale is undistinguished in a double sense, ordinary if not glaringly so, but also indistinguishable from what one supposes would be Margaret Atwood’s normal way of expressing herself in the circumstances. This is a serious defect, unpardonable maybe for the genre: a future that has no language invented for it lacks a personality. That must be why, collectively, it is powerless to scare.”

-Mary McCarthy, The New York Times

“This cri de coeur is certainly impassioned, and Atwood’s adept style renders the grim atmosphere of the future quite palpably. But the didacticism of the novel wears thin; the book is simply too obvious to support its fictional context. Still, Atwood is quite an esteemed fiction writer, the author of such well-received novels as Surfacing (1973) and Life before Man (1980). Demand for her latest effort, therefore, is bound to be high; unfortunately, the number of disappointed readers may be equally high.”

-Brad Hooper, Booklist

“Offred’s monotonous manner of expression just drones and drones.”

-Robert Linkous, San Francisco Review of Books

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The handmaid's tale, common sense media reviewers.

Gripping dystopian novel of religious state against women.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this book.

The Handmai'd Tale is a highly regarded example of

Like most dystopian novels, The Handmaid's Tale in

The narrator, known as "Offred," has the courage t

The threat of corporal punishiment hangs over all

Nonreproductive sex is prohibited in Gilead, punis

Profanity is prohibited in Gilead, but swear words

Drinking, recreational drugs, and smoking are all

Parents need to know that The Handmaid's Tale is a powerful, potentially disturbing dystopian satire set in a future America where women have been stripped of all their civil rights. It features strong language, emotional and physical violence, and a couple of graphic sex scenes. The corpses of dissidents are…

Educational Value

The Handmai'd Tale is a highly regarded example of dystopian fiction, a piece of satire specific to its date of origin and still relevant many years later and in many other cultures. Nominated for the Booker Prize and a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, it is frequently required reading in school and is often the target of censorship campaigns. It can serve as a springboard for discussions about religion, law, feminism, and many other topics.

Positive Messages

Like most dystopian novels, The Handmaid's Tale instructs by negative example. Gilead is shown to be a hierarchical, monotheocratic patriarchy. Women have no autonomy, no control over finances, their bodies, or their intellectual pursuits. Author Margaret Atwood is most harsh in her depiction of fundamentalism of any kind, rather than any particular form of religion or government.

Positive Role Models

The narrator, known as "Offred," has the courage to question her captivity and hope for a day of freedom. Over the course of the novel, she begins to rebel in subtle ways.

Violence & Scariness

The threat of corporal punishiment hangs over all the characters in The Handmaid's Tale. The corpses of dissidents are hung in public as grim reminders of the cost of rebellion. Offred does not witness much violence firsthand, but she learns of handmaids who have committed suicide by hanging. The most violent scene in the novel involves a Salvaging, a public ceremony where the women are whipped into a frenzy and then allowed to beat an accused prisoner to death.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Nonreproductive sex is prohibited in Gilead, punishable by exile or even death. As a handmaid, Offred must participate in the Ceremony, in which she lies between the legs of the Commander's Wife and then has sex with the Commander. (This is the novel's most sexually explicit scene.) Later, Offred spends time at a brothel as a guest of the Commander and even develops a sexual relationship with another character.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Profanity is prohibited in Gilead, but swear words cannot be completely eradicated. "S--t" is used relatively frequently, as both an explitative and as a reference to feces. "Bitch," "tits," "damn" and "goddamn" are employed once or twice each. "F--k" and variations of it are used in the Ceremony scene.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Drinking, recreational drugs, and smoking are all prohibited in Gilead. Offred eventually learns, however, that alcohol and tobacco are available to the most powerful men. Scenes late in the novel are set in a brothel where drinking and smoking occur.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Handmaid's Tale is a powerful, potentially disturbing dystopian satire set in a future America where women have been stripped of all their civil rights. It features strong language, emotional and physical violence, and a couple of graphic sex scenes. The corpses of dissidents are hung in public as grim reminders of the cost of rebellion. There is mention of handmaids who have committed suicide by hanging. The most violent scene in the novel involves a public ceremony where women are whipped into a frenzy and then allowed to beat an accused person to death. The novel was adapted for the award-wining television series of the same name that premiered in 2017.

Where to Read

Community reviews.

• Parents say (8)
• Kids say (17)

Based on 8 parent reviews

Blessed Be!

What's the story.

The narrator of THE HANDMAID'S TALE, known only as "Offred," tells of her life in the monotheocracy of Gilead, in what used to be the United States, sometime in the near future. She is a handmaid, kept to breed with "the Commander" and provide an heir at a time when the human birthrate is dangerously low. As she remembers the years before her captivity and begins to dream of an end to her captivity, Offred develops new relationships with the Commander, his Wife and their driver. But can she trust any of them?

Is It Any Good?

Details matter to Margaret Atwood, and Offred's tale is related with precision and deep compassion. The Handmaid's Tale is one of the most acclaimed dystopian novels of the 20th century. An uncompromising portrait of a totalitarianism and institutional misogyny, it critiques fundamentalism in all its forms.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about why dystopian novels -- like The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and The Hunger Games (2008) -- continue to be such a popular genre.

Why do you think author Margaret Atwood appends "Historical Notes" to the main narrative of the novel?

Do you think women's rights are in jeopardy today? Where and how?

In what ways can religion can shape government -- and vice versa?

Book Details

• Author : Margaret Atwood
• Genre : Literary Fiction
• Book type : Fiction
• Publisher : Anchor Books
• Publication date : September 13, 1985
• Publisher's recommended age(s) : 16 - 17
• Number of pages : 311
• Last updated : February 4, 2020

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This original book review of the handmaid’s tale got it so crazy wrong, more from books & art, r29 original series.

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Providence College's Student-Run Newspaper Since 1935

Book Review: The Handmaid’s Tale

by The Cowl Editor on October 28, 2021

Arts & Entertainment

Book Review: The Handmaid’s Tale

Margaret atwood’s chilling dystopian vision.

Tully Mahoney ’23

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a chilling exposé of a dystopian reality in which an extreme regime overtakes the US government and creates an ultra-patriarchal, religious state known as the Republic of Gilead. The novel is told from the point of view of a Handmaid, Offred, whose only duty is to produce children for a Commander, a Gilead official, and his wife. She is subjected to participate in a “Ceremony,” a non-consensual ritual that Handmaids undergo in order to conceive children. The main themes that Atwood highlights in the novel are women’s limited choices, the subjugation of women in patriarchal societies, and the female desire for independence.

Some events that take place in The Handmaid’s Tale are very contradictory of the Christian faith, yet the extremist government in the novel justifies these acts using Christianity. Non-consensual sex, adultery, murder, and pre-marital sex are just a few examples of this phenomenon. Such acts are fundamental sins and appear contradictory to a religious state. Atwood’s deep dive into an extremist interpretation of theology, paired with an equally extreme patriarchal mindset, led her to stray from typical Christian dogma.  

On sites like GoodReads, some readers gave The Handmaid’s Tale poor ratings due to Atwood’s lack of usage of quotation marks. These reviewers ignore the importance of her message and instead cling to grammatical choices. Atwood is fully aware of when and where it is proper to use quotation marks, yet she broke this rule with intention and purpose. If one’s main argument against a novel is its grammatical correctness, then they are not truly looking at its deeper meaning.  

The Handmaid’s Tale will make readers love it while simultaneously hating it. There were sections of this novel that hurt to read, forcing some people to picture uncomfortable scenes that they would have never imagined, even in their wildest dreams. A book that makes a reader cringe as they read, yet compels them to keep reading, is a book that is worth one’s time. This dystopian world is a feminist’s nightmare, yet its terrifying reality opens readers’ eyes to the warning that Atwood is attempting to convey as she demonstrates what life would be like if humans adhered to extremist misogynistic views. Notably, the sense of horror present throughout The Handmaid’s Tale is not only limited to its women and their lack of independence, but is also seen in the men who have near-total power in their society, yet show no signs of joy, happiness, or love, which are three components of truly living.

The Handmaid’s Tale is a novel that is important for people of all walks of life to read. History is taught because everyone must learn about the past to not repeat its mistakes. Reading The Handmaid’s Tale can help prevent the realization of a society like described in the novel, one that allowed for a horrible reality for women.

Atwood has a wonderful ability to make a distant reality feel real. Readers are able to see Offred’s world, feel her contempt, and hear her conversations, which will transform their current views on the society in which they live. The Handmaid’s Tale feels very slow in the beginning half, but it is worth pushing through because this section of the text provides a lot of context for its second half, which will leave readers unable to put the book down.

The Handmaid’s Tale has been made into a Hulu TV show for those who are less inclined towards reading or like to pair their books with imagery in film. This reviewer must note that she could not get past the first episode because she felt like it strayed too far from the book and was not an accurate depiction. Nevertheless, the series does a fair job of conveying the general idea of the novel.

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Emma clarke joins currents management as talent manager, liza palmer’s new novel ‘family reservations’ in works as drama series at nbc from ilene chaiken & universal tv.

By Lynette Rice

Lynette Rice

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EXCLUSIVE : Universal TV has acquired rights to Liza Palmer ’s latest book Family Reservations , which it will develop at NBC with writer/executive producer Ilene Chaiken and Keshet Studios.

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Palmer will EP the project with Chaiken, along with Avi Nir (Keshet Media Group), Keren Shahar (Keshet International), Lisa Roos (Keshet Studios) and Peter Traugott (Keshet Studios). Heather Brewster (Keshet Studios) will co-EP.

Universal Studio Group’s Creative Acquisitions and IP Management team, led by Jordan Moblo, was instrumental in securing rights to the novel. Keshet Studios has a first-look deal with Universal Television .

“Liza Palmer’s delicious book brings together the very things I love most in the world – food and family drama!” said Chaiken. “I’m thrilled and grateful that she has entrusted us with the television adaptation.”

“ Family Reservations is a labor of love that was written every morning from 5:30 to 8:30 during cancer surgeries and day-job headaches,” said Palmer. “Over those long months and years, the Winters became family to me. I’ve ugly cried more times than I’d like to admit because I now know my little complicated family are in the best of hands with the brilliant, creative teams at Universal Television, Keshet Studios and NBC. Having these precious, complex women in the capable hands of Ilene Chaiken is truly a dream come true.” 

Best known for creating the Showtime series The L Word,  Chaiken received an Emmy for Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale . She was the showrunner of the Fox series Empire and served as executive producer of The L Word: Generation Q for Showtime. She is repped by WME, 3 Arts Entertainment, and Hansen Jacobson Teller Hoberman.

Keshet Studios is repped by WME and by Range Management for unscripted.

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