by Jae Baeli

Created on: November 28, 2008

The Handmaid's Tale: An American Dream Gone Awry

In today's futuristic literature, one can find the foreshadowing of tomorrow's issues splattered upon today's newspapers. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is a haunting portrayal of the American Dream gone awry. In the pages of this ominous novel, one finds echoes of a past not unlike our present, and a future twisted by the repercussions of religious zeal and environmental devastation. Many of the horrors reflected by the handmaid who narrates represent the agenda of issues touted by feminists: sexism, pollution, Christian-Fundamentalism's dangerous inclinations, and racism.

The Handmaid's Tale is a chilling look at a futuristic society wherein the government rules through oppression, deprivation, and threat of execution. Atwood's vision is at once frightening and credible, illustrating a scenario that demands attention and consideration from all-whether they believe in the power of the American Dream, or not.

The Handmaid's Tale uses the Republic of Gilead as its setting, and the themes of the American Dream are played out upon this stage; the players easily represent the crude underbelly of current-day society and its victims. Christian- Fundamentalists, after a coop which results in the machine-gun execution of Congress and the President, usurp the freedoms which Americans once enjoyed. Reading has been outlawed; personal property is now a thing of the past; all liberties are taken from the citizens of Gilead, so that it is reduced to a tyrannical theocracy. This is Atwood's fictional rendition of the New World.

The Christian-Fundamentalist government in The Handmaid's Tale has taken as its basic tenets the teachings of the Old Testament and interprets all scripture in a literal sense. This includes the procreation process as depicted in the book of Genesis wherein Rachel offers Jacob her maid, Bilhah, as a surrogate when Rachel is unable to conceive. In Atwood's Gilead, this surrogate motherhood is a must; a ghastly combination of pollution and environmental apathy has left many women sterile. With the extinction of the human race so threatened, the conception of children is assigned to the those women with "viable ovaries." A monthly ceremony is acted out by each Commander, his barren wife, and the fertile handmaid. Restricted to clinical, procreative purposes only, the Commander inseminates the handmaid assigned to him while the Wife holds the handmaid between her legs in a ritualistic manner.

The Old

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