synopsis:

In 'The Handmaid's Tale', Atwood explores the consequences of a reversal of women's rights. In the novel's nightmare world of Gilead, a group of conservative religious extremists has taken power and turned the sexual revolution on its head. Feminists argued for liberation from traditional gender roles, but Gilead is a society founded on a "return to traditional values" and gender roles, and on the subjugation of women by men. What feminists considered the great triumphs of the 1970s — namely, widespread access to contraception, the legalization of abortion, and the increasing political influence of female voters — have all been undone. Women in Gilead are not only forbidden to vote, they are forbidden to read or write.

Atwood's novel also paints a picture of a world undone by pollution and infertility, reflecting 1980s fears about declining birthrates, the dangers of nuclear power, and -environmental degradation.in this novel the life of Offred, a Handmaid, is described. 'Offred' is not the narrator's real name — Handmaid names consist of the word "of" followed by the name of the Handmaid's Commander. Every month, when Offred is at the right point in her menstrual cycle, she must have impersonal, wordless sex with the Commander while his wife Serena sits behind her, holding her hands. Offred's freedom, like the freedom of all women, is completely restricted. As Offred tells the story of her daily life, she frequently slips into flashbacks, from which the reader can reconstruct the events leading up to the beginning of the novel.

The novel closes with an epilogue from 2195, after Gilead has fallen, written in the form of a lecture given by Professor Pieixoto. He explains the formation and customs of Gilead in objective, analytical language.

on this book:

Atwood wrote The Handmaid's Tale in West Berlin and Alabama in the mid-1980s. The novel, published in 1986, quickly became a best-seller. The Handmaid's Tale falls squarely within the twentieth-century tradition of anti-utopian, or dystopian novels, exemplified by classics like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984. Atwood's novel offers a strongly feminist vision of dystopia. She wrote it shortly after the elections of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain, during a period of conservative revival in the West partly fueled by a strong, well-organized movement of religious conservatives who criticized what they perceived as the excesses of the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s and 1970s. The growing power of this "religious right" heightened feminist fears that the gains women had made in previous decades would be reversed.'The Handmaid's Tale' remains one of the most powerful recent portrayals of a totalitarian society, and one of the few dystopian novels to examine in detail the intersection of politics and sexuality.