Are we getting closer to a Handmaid’s Tale?
Has anyone been watching The Handmaid’s Tale, the television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian masterpiece about a state where women’s reproductive systems are strictly controlled by a non-elected government? My husband and I have been glued to it – Sunday night curry and an hour of relentless misery is just what you need to get in the mood for the working week.
I remember when I first read The Handmaid’s Tale. I was 16 and it was the mid-nineties. I loved it, but thought it fundamentally far-fetched. The Republic of Gilead, where a woman’s value is measured solely by her fertility and girls are ritually raped, seemed medieval to me. In my mind, this vision of life was about as realistic as the one presented in The Day of the Triffids or War of the Worlds. At the time, the biggest pop stars on the planet were young women shouting about Girl Power and teachers at our all-girl school were talking about the possibility of studying engineering at Oxbridge. We had lived most of our lives with a female prime minister; we were surpassing boys at almost every level academically.
The idea that any of us would ever see a day where our sex was subjugated did not exist in our idealistic adolescent heads. We were going to reproduce on our own terms, when we were ready, with men who treated us as equals. We were going to take over the world. We didn’t even see that that was part of the problem; that already, we were en route to Gilead.
Today, The Handmaid’s Tale does not seem all that farfetched because as well as playing out on Channel 4 on a Sunday night, it is being played out on the television news and in the papers and on social media, where the National Rifle Association this week released a video that might have been mistaken for parody back in the late Nineties but is, sadly, all too real in the year 2017, where women can run countries but not have abortions in certain areas of them. In it, the NRA rail against the feminists and liberals coming to destroy the American way of life; they advise that the people must be ready to fight with “the clenched fist of truth”. Given the NRA’S primary purpose is the promotion of guns, we must assume that by “clenched fist” what they actually mean is “semi-automatic machine guns”.
I’m about to turn 37 and I have to tell you, I never imagined that some 20 years after I first read The Handmaid’s Tale there would be some parts of the world where Atwood’s book could be classed as non-fiction. This was the week that Theresa May finally teamed up with a homophobic party who do not believe in a woman’s right to control her reproductive health; in Northern Ireland, you cannot have an abortion if you have been raped or if the foetus has a fatal abnormality. Stella Creasy is the wonderful Labour backbencher who managed to get through the amendment to the Queen’s Speech which means women in Northern Ireland will no longer have to pay £1,200 to travel to England for an abortion. It’s nice to have these breakthroughs for our gender just as the iphone celebrates its 10th birthday and driverless cars start ferrying themselves off forecourts.
The fact that Vanity Fair still feels the need to parade pregnant celebrities naked on its cover says a lot, too. When Demi Moore did it a couple of decades ago, it was a bold statement about pregnant women and sexuality. The hoo-ha surrounding the lovely Serena Williams photos this week suggests we are simply incapable of dealing with the fact that a professional tennis player – whether ranked number one or number 700 – might also start a family. Those Serena pictures prove that women can have it all; the fact we paid any attention to them proves that we’d rather they didn’t. Then there’s Cristiano Ronaldo, using an anonymous surrogate to father his new twins. The parallels with The Handmaid’s Tale are creepy. Here women do not even get to be loved. They are simply wombs.
Atwood says that she doesn’t write science fiction. She writes speculative fiction – or “science faction” as she once described it; things that could very possibly happen in the coming years. Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy – released between 2003 and 2013 – featured obscene amounts of cosmetic surgery and genetically modified beings. The books have been optioned by a production company. By the time they make it to television, I suspect that, like The Handmaid’s Tale, we will have trouble deciphering fact from fiction once again.