Why The Handmaid’s Tale Is So Relevant Today

0:00I want you to just picture something for a second. Okay, setting a scene. Yeah, exactly. Just close your eyes if you can and imagine a very specific outfit. It's a cloak. It goes down to the ankles and it is this vibrant, unmistakable, just blood red. Right. And topping it off kind of obscuring the face and restricting your peripheral vision is a stark, white, wide, brimmed bonnet. It's a striking image. It really is. And when that image hits your mind as I, you don't think about like 17th century fashion. No, definitely not. And you don't think about some quaint historical reenactment. I mean, for almost any one living in modern society, that specific combination of red, fabric, and white canvas, instantly and just viscerally screams one thing. Systemic women's oppression. Exactly. It brings us right into the chilling dystopian world of Margaret Atwood 1985 masterpiece, The Handmaid's Tale. It is genuinely remarkable how a simple color palette, you know, that binary stark red and white, has basically bypassed language entirely.

1:02It's become this globally recognized shorthand. You see those colors in that configuration and you instantly understand the exact power dynamic being represented. You know who is the property and you know who is the owner. Exactly. So we are doing a deep dive today into a novel that really just refuses to be categorized as a relic of the 1980s. Oh, it absolutely refuses. We are going to uncover the historical, political, and sociological DNA that Margaret Atwood used to construct the Republic of Gilead. Which is fascinating. It is. We are looking at a comprehensive piece by Jennifer Keishan Armstrong, which explores the origins, the various adaptations, and the stubborn relevance of this story. I love that phrase stubborn relevance. Right. Because it won't go away. And I mean, I have to say, we almost did a deep dive today on some other eclectic sources. We did have a weird lineup today. We really did. Like we almost did prehistoric Slovenian bear traps or AI animal language.

2:02Which to be fair, AI animal language sounds wild. It does, but we decided this cultural phenomenon just demanded our full attention. It really does. But before we dive into the weeds here, I should establish a crucial ground rule for this deep dive. Oh, right. The disclaimer. Yeah, because the source text heavily discusses real world political figures, movements, and policies from all sides of the aisle. Exactly. From both left wing and right wing spheres, including the Reagan and Trump administrations and the Christian right. So it gets heavy. It does. So I must explicitly state that this deep dive is a strictly impartial exploration. We are just the messengers. Right. We are strictly reporting on how these historical moments influence the author and the text. We aren't taking any political sides or endorsing any viewpoints here. Just laying out the facts of the source material. Exactly. Okay. So before we get into all that real world history, I think it's vital to establish exactly what Gilead is for anyone who might be rusty.

3:02Good call. Because the horror of Gilead isn't that it has just always existed in some faraway land. The horror is how quickly it was built over the ruins of a society that looks exactly like ours. Yeah, the foundational premise of Atwiz World is this massive ecological disaster. Right. It's not a zombie virus. No, it's a near future setting. Where widespread environmental toxins, radiation, and chemical spills have caused a catastrophic plummet in global fertility rates. So nobody can have kids. Basically, yeah. Viable pregnancies are incredibly rare. And the infant mortality rate for the few babies that are born is just staggering. The human race is facing a very quiet, very sterile extinction. Which creates sheer panic. Yeah. And fear is the ultimate catalyst for authoritarianism. Right. The United States government doesn't just vote itself out of existence. Definitely not. It is toppled in a highly coordinated, violent coup by a religious fundamentalist group called the Sons of Jacob. And the mechanics of this takeover are terrifyingly simple.

4:03They really are. They assassinate the president. They machine done the members of Congress. And they immediately suspend the Constitution. Under the guise of a national emergency. Exactly. They blame the attacks on Islamic terrorists. They declare martial law. And in the chaos, they begin systematically stripping away rights before the public even understands what has happened. Which brings us to our narrator offered. Yes. And her experience of this transition is crucial because she wasn't some political dissident before the coup. Right. She wasn't a spy or a revolutionary. No. She was just an entirely average woman. She had a job. She had her own money. She was married to a man named Luke. And they had a young daughter. Just a normal everyday life. And I always think about the specific scene in the book where offered realizes her world is over. It doesn't happen with a gun to her head. No, it's so much more mundane than that. It happens at a corner store. She goes to buy a pack of cigarettes. She hands the clerk her card and it has declined. Right. The system just says no. She goes to a pay phone, calls her bank, and finds out that all bank accounts belonging to women

5:05have been frozen. And not just frozen, but the funds transferred to their husbands or closest male relatives. In a single afternoon, her autonomy is erased by a keystroke. It's chilling. It is. And because she is one of the few remaining fernel women, she's separated from her family, reeducated through state violence, and forced into a system of ritualized, reproductive slavery. Yeah, her name itself offered is a patronemic, which literally means a Fred. Exactly. She is literally a Fred. She is the property of her commander. Her sole function in this Republic of Gilead is to bear children for the elite ruling class. Right. Through a monthly, non-consensual ritual called the ceremony, which is grounded in this twisted, literal interpretation of the biblical story of Rachel and her handmade Bilha. Okay, let's unpack this. Because I've often heard people refer to this book as one of the great works of science fiction, you know, right up there with Orwell and Huxley.

6:05Sure, people do say that. But atwood herself pushes back on that label quite aggressively. She does. She insists that the handmaid's tail is not science fiction at all. She calls it speculative fiction, strictly speculative fiction. She draws a very hard line in the sand regarding that definition. Why, I mean, isn't calling it speculative, just a rebrand of sci-fi for literary snobs? It sounds like it, right? But for atwood, science fiction deals with things that do not exist and cannot currently exist. So like warp drives. Exactly. Science fiction has warp drives, it has Martian invasions, it has teleportation devices. Okay, so what is her definition of speculative? Speculative fiction, according to the rigid rule she set for herself while writing this book. Imagine a future that could conceivably happen, using only the tools, technologies, and human behaviors that already exist today. So no monsters, no spaceships. Right. If it happens in Gilead, it has happened or could happen in the real world. I have to admit, when I first heard that, I thought she was splitting hairs. It's a fair critique.

7:06The literary world loves to debate these boundaries. But you're saying this rule actually changes things? It completely changes the psychological impact on the reader and the listener. That's it. Well, when there are no aliens to blame, the horror comes from human nature and historical precedent. Oh, I see. Because when you watch a movie about an alien invasion, you can close the laptop and say, well, the aliens aren't coming, so I don't need to worry. Exactly. But when you remove the speculative technology, you are left staring at the terrifying capacity of human nature. It makes the fiction a mirror rather than an escape. Exactly. You realize you aren't reading a fantasy, you're reading a historical mosaic of human cruelty, just reassembled in a Boston suburb. Man, that is so bleak. But it's true. And that rule of historical grounding applied to every aspect of her world building, right? Down to the most visual mundane details. Which actually brings us to a surprisingly bizarre origin story from the text. I want to lighten the mood just a tiny bit here. Good luck with that. Let's talk about the iconic handmaid's uniform.

8:08Ah, yes. The bonnet. Right. Because while the red cloak and white bonnet scream puritan oppression to us now, Atwood, who is Canadian, actually took inspiration for the bonnet from a very different source. A very domestic source. Yeah, she pulled it from the logo of a Canadian laundry and cleaning products company called Old Dutch. Wait, really? The Old Dutch Cleanser logo? Yes. If you look it up, the vintage Old Dutch Cleanser logo is literally a woman wearing a blue dress and a large face obscuring white bonnet violently chasing dirt with a stick. That is incredible. And the irony is just it's incredibly layered there. It's totally wild, right? A symbol of ultimate female subjugation was drawn from a literal icon of domestic housework and cleaning products. It really highlights how mid-20th century advertising heavily leaned into the archetype of the happy homemaker. Oh, absolutely. Domesticity was sold as the ultimate fulfillment. An Atwood takes that visual shorthand.

9:10A trademark for scrubbing floors, strips away the brand name and exposes the inherent restriction underneath. It's so brilliant. But it makes you wonder if she was finding the inspiration for authoritarian uniforms on a can of scouring powder. How did she build this speculative political world? Well, she didn't have to look far. Where did she look? She just looked at the newspaper headlines of the 1980s. Let's get into the 1980s blueprint then. Because when fiction mirrors the present, it gets really eerie. Eerie pressience is exactly the phrase. The source notes that when the book debuted in 1985 to instant acclaim, I mean, it was shortlisted for the man book or a nebula awards. It was huge. Yeah. Atwood literally carried newspaper clippings to her interviews to prove her plot points weren't made up. She had this massive scrapbook. Because journalists would say, you know, a theocratic takeover of America. That's a bit much. And she would just pull out a clipping. She'd point to an article from the previous week and say, I didn't invent this. They're already talking about doing it. So what exactly was she tracking?

10:11She was meticulously tracking the rise of conservatism and televangelism in the early 1980s US political climate. Right. The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, which marked the ascension of the Christian right as a highly organized political force. We are talking about powerful lobbying organizations like the moral majority focus on the family and the Christian coalition. Exactly. And a massive part of this cultural shift was driven by televangelism, which brings us back to the character of Serena Joy. Yes. Serena Joy is such a complex villain. In Gilead, she is the commander's wife. So she's offered air as direct oppressor. But we learned she used to be a wildly successful televangelist. Right. She built an empire based on the premise that women should not have careers and should be entirely subservient to their husbands, which connects her directly to the 1980s televangelists and conservative figures of that era. If you analyze her pre-Gilead career, she bears a striking resemblance to real world figures who mobilize conservative women

11:13to advocate for traditional domestic roles. There's this quote from Atwood about Serena Joy that the source analyzes and it's devastating. Offered observes her and thinks she doesn't make speeches anymore. She's become speechless how furious she must be now that she's been taken at her word. That phrase taken at her word is the profound irony here. Right. Because she built the cage she stuck in. Exactly. A woman who built her platform, advocating for a Theocratic society where women, belong solely in the home, is literally trapped by her own success. They took her power away once they didn't meet her mouthpiece anymore. She demanded a world where women couldn't speak and the regime gave it to her. That is just, wow. The source also brings in the perspective of English professor Essie Newman on this whole feminist backlash. Moomin has a really sharp framing of this. She says offered as a product of 1970s feminism trapped in a fictional realization of the 1980s backlash against women's rights. It makes perfect sense. In the 70s, women gained access to birth control,

12:16entered the workforce, expected bodily autonomy. And then the 80s hit. And that backlash was gaining serious traction. Adwood's clippings documented aggressive attempts to roll back those exact rights. The source lists some specific real-world events driving this, like the propaganda video, The Silent Scream, which was widely distributed by right wing organizations and even screened at the White House. And there were abortion clinic bombings, arson cases, and proposed laws granting fetuses, civil rights protections. It was a very volatile time. The Reagan administration also had a major policy shift. The global gag rule, right? Yes. They started funding only international women's health groups that promoted abstinence or natural family planning in underdeveloped countries. So she's watching all this happen, but I have a question here. Sure. What is it? It's one thing for you and me to see these cultural shifts, these lobbying groups. But how does an author jump from lobbying groups to a full-blown totalitarian regime? It feels like a massive logistical leap. Right. You don't just go from defunding clinics to a state where fertile women are rounded up

13:18and subjected to state-sanctioned rape. How did she bridge that gap? Well, Atwood didn't just look at America. She looked at the extremes of what other nations were already doing. So Atwood's American dystopia was actually a patchwork quilt of global human rights violations. Exactly. She borrowed heavily from real-world dictatorships. Okay. Let's list these global sources because Giliad is really an international nightmare imported to the US. It truly is. Let's start with Romania under Nikolai Zasiscu. The obsession with boosting female birth rates. Right. Zasiscu essentially decided women's wombs were state property to boost the workforce. The real-world policing of pregnant women there was horrific. They completely banned abortion and birth control. And they enforced it with sicker police, the security, requiring mandatory monthly gynecological exams at workplaces. That is literally the doctor visits in the book. It's a one-to-one translation. And for the mechanics of state violence, Atwood looked at the Philippines

14:19under Ferdinand Marcos. The brutal murders of dissidents. Yes, extrojudicial assassinations where bodies were dumped in public spaces as a warning. Which draws a direct line to Giliad's summary executions, right? The bodies left hanging on the wall. The wall in Giliad is exactly that mechanism of psychological subjugation. But the most chilling parallel to the handmade system. I mean, the one that really gets me comes from Argentina. The 1976 military junta. Yes. In the book, offered as daughter is stolen and given to a loyalist family. That actually happened in Argentina. Tragically, yes. The military junta disappeared up to 500 children from lower classes or political dissidents. Oh my god. And they literally gave them to selected leaders of the ruling class. They believed they were saving the children from subversive ideologies. Atwood didn't invent state-sanctioned child theft. She just translated it. She really did. And she also translated global systems of racial segregation. Right. The apartheid South Africa parallels. Because African Americans in the novel

15:20are resettled to national homelands in the Midwest. Which is a direct parallel to the Ben Toostans of apartheid era of South Africa, where the government stripped Black South Africans of citizenship and forced them into segregated territories. And as the source points out, to give some contextual reality, supporting apartheid wasn't entirely fringe in the US government at the time. It was a heavily debated foreign policy issue. The source cites that future vice president Dick Cheney opposed the release of Nelson Mandela. And Senator John McCain voted against divesting from the South African government. And again, keeping to our impartiality rule, we are just recording the historical context of the era Atwood was observing. Right. We're just saying that she saw a world where a racist, segregating regime wasn't universally condemned and wove that into her dystopia. So Atwood took Romanian reproductive policing, Argentine child theft, and South African segregation. But to make it work in America, she needed an American foundation. Exactly. Which brings us to the architecture

16:20of radical governments. How does that work? Well, Atwood outlined a core philosophy in a 2012 guardian piece. She said, nations never build apparently radical forms of government on foundations that aren't there already. Meaning you can't build a skyscraper on sand. Right. She used the USSR as the prime example. They replaced the imperial secret police of the Tsars with an even more dreaded secret police, the KGB. The infrastructure of terror was already there. They just built a new house on it. Okay. Here's where it gets really interesting. Oh, I agree. Because if nations build on existing foundations, what is America's foundation? We like to think it's the 18th century enlightenment, you know, equality, separation of church and state. That's the operating system we're taught about. Right. So how did Atwood get to a theocracy? Because Atwood's terrifying thesis is that the true, deep foundation of the US isn't the enlightenment. Was it? It's 17th century Puritan New England. The Massachusetts Bay colony. Exactly. A heavy-handed theocracy

17:21with a marked bias against women, just waiting for a period of social chaos to reassert itself. They didn't come over for everyone's religious freedom. They came over for their own strict religious laws. And their society was structured around systemic misogyny. Women were forbidden from speaking in church or holding authority. And we pointed out how this Puritan language was already being revived in the 1980s. It was everywhere in political rhetoric. Reagan famously referred to his dream of the US as a shining city on a hill. A term directly co-opted from the Puritans. John Winthrop said that in 1630. Yes. And when he said it, it wasn't about democracy. It was a threat that if they didn't strictly uphold their rigid laws, God would destroy them. So it challenges you as the listener to think about the foundations of your own societies. Absolutely. What historical precedence lie dormant beneath modern democracies, just waiting for a crisis to justify their return? It's a heavy question. But with such a rock solid,

18:22chillingly real premise, adapting this to the screen should have been a slam dunk. Right? You would think so. Well, let's talk about the 1990 movie because I am genuinely baffled at this adaptation. It is a spectacular case study in how to misunderstand a masterpiece. It was a spectacular financial failure too. They had a $13 million budget and only made back $5 million. The financial failure is nothing compared to the creative failure. So what was the problem? The film was fundamentally misunderstood by his German director, Volker Schlundorf. The source says he envisioned it as a sexual thriller. Yes, a sexual thriller. How do you read a feminist warning about reproductive slavery and decide it's a sexy thriller? It reveals the deep discomfort the film industry had with the radical, heavily female material at the time. They were terrified of the politics. Completely. And the consequences of this misinterpretation were disastrous. Even with Natasha Richardson as Alfred and Fay Dunnoay. Despite the great cast, the film completely stripped

19:22off of her agency. Because they took away her voice over, right? Exactly. By removing the crucial voice over narrative, the film lost the urgency of the book and ended up objectifying the main character more than ever. You just watch a woman being victimized instead of hearing her internal resistance. It replicated the exact dynamic the book was protesting. Thankfully, the story survived the cinematic failure through a renaissance of other lower profile adaptations, showing its profound versatility across mediums. Right, there were stage plays like the one at Tufts University and a UK tour. And in 2000, pool routers adapted it into an opera that traveled from Copenhagen to London and Canada. There was even a 2013 interpretation by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, which is brilliant because Ballet relies on physical expression, perfectly communicating the physical subjugation without needing dialogue. But it wasn't until a streaming service got hold of it that Gilead truly invaded modern pop culture. The Hulu era. Yes, the 2017 Hulu television series premiere,

20:23starring Elizabeth Moss. The showrunners made some brilliant, terrifying updates to the timeline, bringing Alfred's pre-Gilead life directly into the present day. The flashbacks feature Uber, Tinder, Capuchinos, and Craigslist. Which is so smart, adding these modern comforts makes the loss of freedom feel even more visceral to a modern audience. It collapses the distance between the viewer and the dystopia. And we have to talk about the 2017 political parallels because the timing of the show was wild. It premiered just three months after the inauguration of Donald Trump, which was a very anxious time for a lot of people. The source quotes a 2006 retrospective by Joyce Carol Oates, noting the chilling pressions of Atwood's plot. Where Gilead is established via Christian fundamentalists using a national emergency to declare martial law. Right, they blame Islamic fanatics, eliminate gay people, subjugate women, and maintain power through continual wars. And these flashpoints dovetailed perfectly with the anxieties of 2017. There were widespread fears of authoritarianism

21:24and, of ice, president Mike Pence, known for his anti-gay and anti-abortion beliefs. Framing this impartially as the public context, those cultural anxieties are what fueled the show's explosive resonance. It leaped from the screen to the streets. Literally. I marvel at how the costume became this phenomenon. Women began wearing handmade costumes to protest restrictive abortion bills. We saw it in Ohio, and even in the Isle of Man. It's the ultimate legally unassailable protest uniform. And the women's march that year literally mirrored the TV series Flashback Scenes of women protesting the scripting of their rights in the streets. The show just continued to evolve alongside the culture too, especially in season two, which went beyond the narrative of Atwood's novel. Yes, season two coincided with the Hashtag Me Too movement. Offered starts finding methods to take back her power within the regime, building whisper networks, which directly connected to real women, finding power via the Hashtag Me Too and Hashtag Times Up movements. The producers intentionally constructed the season with this changing landscape in mind.

22:26They recognized the feedback loop between the art and the reality. Speaking of taking back power, there is this famous phrase from the book scratched in a cupboard by offered predecessor. Ah, yes. No lead tea bastards, carburene d'Orum. Don't let the bastards grind you down. It's become such a massive feminist rallying cry. I mean, many women literally have it tattooed on their bodies, reclaiming the flesh in a very permanent way, which leads to this bizarre doubleness of the iconography. Atwood herself observed this dual life of her creation. She asked, Revellers dress up as handmaids on Halloween, and also for protest marches, these two uses of its costumes mirroring its doubleness. Is it entertainment or dire political prophecy? Can it be both? It really is both. So what does this all mean? That's the big question. We've been on this journey with a book rooted in the 1980s, built on the foundations of 17th century Puritanism and Global Human Rights Abuse. Perfectly updated for the digital age. Serving as both a cultural mirror and a political warning.

23:29And I want to leave you the listener, with a final thought not previously discussed, but deeply rooted in the source text's closing question. Lay it on us. The article asks, if we will still feel this story is uniquely relevant, if another adaptation appears three decades from now. I'm guessing this. But consider this, if Gilead is truly built on the deep foundation of our society, perhaps the question isn't whether the handmaids tale will remain relevant, but whether a society can ever truly rewrite its foundational code without collapsing entirely. Wow. If nations only build radical governments on existing foundations, what positive egalitarian foundations are we laying today for the speculative fiction writers of tomorrow? Are we writing a new code or just waiting for the old one to reboot? That is incredible to think about. There's something to mull over. Thank you so much for joining us on this deep dive. Keep questioning those foundations and whatever you do. Don't let the bastards grind you down. We'll catch you next time.