The Handmaid’s Tale. When they greenlit the series, producers could not have predicted the election outcome that has given many readers reason to return to books like Atwood’s, Orwell’s and Huxley’s. In fact, both 1984 and The Handmaid’s Talehave topped Amazon’s best-sellers list in recent months.
The Handmaid’s Tale arrived like an earthquake in the dialogue between faith and reason in 1985 — and since has become a curriculum staple in many women’s studies courses. In it, Atwood describes a woman’s fight to escape God-quoting oppressors who have turned America into a theocracy where women are stripped of their rights and torture is justified in the name of national security.
In this week’s New Yorker, Atwood tells writer Rebecca Mead that “she intended not just to pose the essential question of dystopian fiction — could it happen here? — but also to suggest ways that it had already happened, here or elsewhere.”
Growing up in Canada, Atwood knew members of the Polish resistance from World War II who had fled there during the war. She recalls, “I remember one person saying a very telling thing: ‘Pray you will never have occasion to be a hero.’”
Mead writes that “what does feel familiar” in rereading the book “is the blunt misogyny of the society Atwood portrays, and which Trump’s vocal repudiation of ‘political correctness’ has loosed into common parlance today.
Trump’s vilification of Hillary Clinton, Atwood believes, is more explicable when seen through the lens of the Puritan witch hunts. “You can find websites that say Hillary was actually a Satanist with demonic powers,” she said. “It is so 17th-century that you can hardly believe it. It’s right out of the subconscious — just lying there, waiting to be applied to people.”
That's exactly how I saw it too. This scene from the Republican convention sent chills down my spine:
As Rebecca Traister tweeted at the time:
Since Goody Rodham was placed in the water and thence did float & was observed conversing with a tall man in the woods, is she not GUILTY?
The image of Clinton in an orange jumpsuit was everywhere:
The febrile excitement among the crowd at the RNC and at the rallies was overwhelming. It literally took my breath away. Even more discomfiting was the fact that so few people seemed to give a damn --- or see the creepy parallels to this specific type of mob hysteria.
During a 2006 interview with Bill Moyers for the Faith and Reason series, Atwood tells Bill she believes the Salem witch trials and the hysteria that erupted in that community is “one of the foundation events of American history.” She tells Mead, “The legacy of witch hunting, and the sense of shame that it engendered is an enduring American blight.”
It's still with us. But we have to be careful not to talk to much about it or people will be upset. So, shhhh.
