4 Questions About The 'Atwoodverse'
'The Handmaid's Tale', the Hulu series, and 'The Testaments' require a closer look
With the fifth and final season of the Hulu show based on Margaret Atwood’s iconic novel The Handmaid’s Tale being underway, it’s important to take a closer look into this universe as a whole, particularly since the 2019 sequel novel The Testaments is also being made into a spinoff show. The franchise is getting bigger and is generating a lot of buzz now that the controversial Texas abortion law just passed.
The first novel follows its main character Offred (played by Elizabeth Moss in the TV adaptation) after she is taken from a normal life and forced to be a Handmaid (a reproductive slave) in the newly established Republic of Gilead. The Testaments takes place around 15 years after the events of the first novel and documents the race to destroy Gilead. Here are some questions and critiques regarding the novels that are worth diving into.
Where is the diversity in the novels?
The Hulu adaptation had some trouble correcting the lack of diversity in the novels. Atwood never describes her characters’ appearance, so there could have been room for creative freedom. Yet, the reason why you just know the main characters are white is because race is not mentioned extensively in the book and attitudes towards those of a different race and/or ethnicity in Gilead are not explained or shown. And further, most Christian fundamentalist groups, which Gilead is no doubt inspired by, are white supremacist. White supremacy and misogyny (along other discriminatory structures) go hand in hand. So, in a story about anti-patriarchal struggle, where are the non-white people? Intersectionality seems to be missing from the novels’ feminism.
And it’s not just racialised communities that are absent from the narrative (thereby creating a very white-centric cast of characters), but other communities as well. We briefly get to see Moira’s experience as a lesbian, and in the show Ofglen is revealed to have had a wife and child before Gilead, but we don’t get to see how Gilead affects transgender people and gender-fluid people, or how it treats disabled people (even though I’m pretty sure we can guess)? The story only seems to portray a certain type of victim of Gilead (that is, white heterosexual women), something which the show tries to fix but still doesn’t quite reach.
Where are the Communists and Anarchists? Where is the revolution?! Why is Mayday so apolitical?
To be fair, it’s been a while since I watched the show and read the first book so I might be wrong about this, but this is a complaint I have with a lot of dystopian stories. Bottom line is, the only reason your life is somewhat bearable is because a communist or an anarchist decided to risk and give their lives for your right to exist. They protested in peaceful and unpeaceful ways to try to bring the state and corporations to accountability and fought tooth and nail for all those labour benefits we have now. Therefore, realistically speaking, there is no way that Gilead could have risen without the Left putting up a good fight. The United States has a long history of brutally cracking down on communists and anarchists; standing against Gilead wouldn’t have been as great of a danger as other causes that communists and anarchists have fought for.
Additionally, Atwood describes pre-Gilead times as being miserable for Americans, with lots crime and violence against women, unemployment, and other social ills. Already, in the middle of a pandemic, issues such as the climate crisis, tensions with the police state, and a fascist approach to immigration (to name just a few), have pushed the American proletariat further left than it has been in a while. Revolutionary tension is simmering. Assuming that Gilead rose to power in such a politically polarizing environment, then we have to assume that many would have taken the opportunity for revolution. Further, Black revolutionaries that have done much of the legwork in social justice would not be so easily wiped out, as in reality they have been resisting Gilead-like conditions for centuries. It would have been more realistic to include a repression of the Left in the novels’ plot, which also would have given credit to the people whose ideas and efforts try to keep this society from collapsing in on itself. However, we can hardly expect American media to even utter the words ‘communism’ or ‘anarchism’ without reverting back to cold war hysteria narratives.
One thing the sequel novel The Testaments gets right is that Mayday, the underground resistance network trying to bring down the Republic of Gilead, is internationally branded as a terrorist organization, and so have very little resources to do their work. Many organizations and activists (typically grassroots and either communist or anarchist) who do meaningful work are branded terrorists by the United States (such as Nelson Mandela). This is usually because they are socialist, or align themselves with socialist states, or espouse communist or anarchist beliefs (again, such as Nelson Mandela). Mayday, which features more extensively in The Testaments, does not feel like it doesn’t have a political affiliation. We know Mayday wants to get rid of Gilead, but if they want to bring back the United States (a settler colonialist, imperialist police state built on stolen land) then they are not really the ‘good guys’, are they? Bringing down Gilead and building a completely new system is what Mayday should be about. This is also the problem with a lot of ‘resistance’ groups in sci-fi or dystopian stories: they are happy to take the aesthetic and edge of revolutionary groups from the past and present but do not commit to the ideas (which are the important part). Revolution, actual, radical revolution, has yet to be properly represented in American media, despite many efforts by creators and writers to sneak it in there.
Did we need an Aunt Lydia backstory?
Aunt Lydia, the character in The Handmaids’ Tale known for her ruthless devotion to training women to be Handmaids, doled out brutal punishment, yet was steadfast in her belief that all her actions were righteous and good for the women in her care. Aunt Lydia belongs to the Aunt class, which is tasked with the management of the ‘female sphere’ of the regime. She is a more direct and effective villain than any man in the novel, including Commander Fred; she is the embodiment of white women who proclaim allegiance to a misogynist and white supremacist system. However, The Testaments undid all this by making Aunt Lydia a sympathetic character that is ultimately the one responsible for bringing down Gilead, having planned an elaborate scheme to do so over many years. The Testaments depicts her actions in the previous novel (and the show) as being simply a method of survival. Not only is this plot twist of Aunt Lydia’s secret heroics predictable and bland, but it reduces her to another innocent woman who fell victim to the evil Gilead regime.
This tendency by white feminists to group together all women in a single umbrella of patriarchal oppression is the enemy of intersectionality. It is exhausting and dangerous because it leads to the co-opting of other struggles, mainly that of Black people against the US police state. The effect that this has is that it minimizes the immense effort and sacrifice put into such a struggle. The Women’s March is perhaps the most recent and on the nose example of this co-opting taking place. Taking place in January 2017, the Women’s March was organized by mostly white women who initially thought it would be a good idea to go with the name ‘Million Women March’, which is the exact same name of the 1997 march organized for and by Black women against discrimination. After getting called out, they decided to name it ‘The Women’s March on Washington’, which is very close to Martin Luther King, Jr. 's ‘March on Washington,’ which was when he delivered his famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.
In fact, Atwood does this exact thing not only by having all the enslaved characters be white, but also by featuring cartoonish terms like ‘the Underground Femaleroad’ to refer to the underground network that smuggles women out of Gilead and into Canada. Of course, it was Atwood’s intention that everything taking place in her shared universe be based on real history, but the nod to history could have been done better by actually positioning more Black women as either champions in this Underground Femaleroad, or as triumphant escaped Handmaids. This is probably a case of when an author tries to show the reality of something but people take it too literally and eventually turn it into something else. We may never know.
Why does the ‘Atwoodverse’ resonate so much with white feminists?
The Atwoodverse has problematic associations with white feminism, as mentioned above, but what are the other critiques on it from a more intersectional, radical feminist perspective? Firstly, the historical inspiration is something Atwood is adamant about, it doesn’t resonate so much with Black feminists. As Sherronda J. Brown of Wear Your Voice Magazine argues, white feminism defines reproductive justice to mean the right not to have children. However, the history of Black and indigenous women being similar to The Handmaid’s Tale, to them reproductive justice also means the fight for the right to have children without “government interference or barriers created through white supremacy and systemic oppression.” There have been instances of white women using the Handmaid imagery as an ominous warning of a scary future where whiteness does not protect from enslavement. But for Black and indigenous women being Handmaids, Econowives, and being sent to the colonies to die is a historical reality, which is now being whitewashed and appropriated.
Overall, there is a lot to unpack and discuss in the ‘Atwoodverse’, so it is a shame that a great piece of literature has been claimed by white neoliberal feminists. Though perhaps Atwood and the show runners are partly to blame for the concerns raised in this article. Dystopian fiction as a genre both on and off screen will continue to suffer from these concerns until it is unafraid to deal with its ‘revolution’ theme to the full extent of the word’s definition. The Handmaid’s Tale will continue to suffer intersectional feminist critique until it gives agency, voice, and empowerment to the people it has forgotten.
By A. Jordan Ortiz