ABSTRACT
Nearly 35 years after its publication, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is more relevant and more urgent than ever. This chapter returns to Atwood’s modern classic and examines its influence and legacies in contemporary feminist dystopian writing. Addressing Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things (2015) and Sophie Mackintosh’s The Water Cure (2018), it considers how Atwood’s second-wave feminist concerns around liberty, sisterhood, bodily autonomy, and resistance to the patriarchy are reimagined in the 21st century by a later generation of “post-feminist” women writers. Atwood’s novel casts a long shadow and both Wood and Mackintosh are cognisant of its impact. Like Atwood, they place their female protagonists in a largely female-dominated space that is nevertheless delimited by the logics of patriarchy, and they explore the manner in which women can perpetuate the violence of patriarchal systems, even in the absence of men. By reading these three texts together and alongside The Testaments (2019)—Atwood’s own 21st-century return to Gilead—the chapter examines how women writers use dystopian narratives to explore contemporary feminist politics and to expose contemporary anxieties around the accretion and erosion of women’s rights.
