ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale , a feminist dystopia. In contrast with the Suffragist context of Gilman’s utopia, Atwood’s dystopia has “second wave feminism” as its context. There was considerable backlash against second wave feminism, sometimes from religious groups, including conservative and religious women. In The Handmaid’s Tale, published in 1986, Atwood takes up patriarchal inequities in then-contemporary U.S. society and in other societies around the world, and enhances them in keeping with “conservative” religious tendencies in the U.S. By intensifying patriarchal subordination, and connecting that intensification with religious trends in America, Atwood does not try to set out a realistic or plausible vision of America’s future. Rather, she seeks to render more salient the patriarchal relations that already exist in the U.S. and the ways in which they undermine egalitarianism. Atwood highlights the violation and loss of American ideals, in part by drawing on American slave narratives as a model. Though her social criticism is aimed for the most part at American patriarchy, Atwood is also critical of some strands of feminism, often strands that recall Gilman.
