Handmaid’s Tale was a little too close to home
What was the most harrowing part of The Handmaid’s Tale, the chillingly, thrillingly good TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel? In Puritan Gilead, babies are a miracle and the rare woman like Offred (Elisabeth Moss) who is still fertile is enslaved and forced to endure creepy, ritualised couplings with her Commander.
If she falls pregnant (Blessed be the fruit!), she must bear a child for his barren, thwarted wife, Serena. Offred’s real name is June, but each handmaiden is called after her master (of Fred), a numbing erasure of identity, completed by her red uniform and penitential white cap.
Sunday’s finale offered a top selection of worst moments. “Oh, man, I hate stonings,” whined one handmaiden when the girls were summoned to put to death some miscreant. It turned out to be their friend Janine, who was guilty of wanting to keep her own child.
The most gut-wrenching moment came when Serena drove Offred to a distant house.
From her vantage point in a locked car, Offred was able to see – but not touch or speak to – her own little girl, who had been confiscated. Everything that Offred had suppressed in herself, for reasons of survival,
exploded in a primal frenzy of maternal love.
It was almost too hard to watch. So why did the gruelling
Handmaid’s Tale build such a huge following? In a week when scientists revealed that Western men have suffered a 50 per cent decline in sperm count, the relevance was not hard to spot.
A flashback where June was enjoying her career when her credit card was declined (working women’s bank accounts were frozen) filled you with a sense of dread that crept through your veins like heavy metal.
Critics have made lazy parallels with Trump’s America. Far more devastating is that this self-same cruelty – the uniform (burka), the denial of female sexual pleasure (genital mutilation), the enforced marriage – is happening in some Muslim communities today. And the “honour killings” that we read of that come as a result of a girl going out with a boy that her family didn’t approve of.
Science fiction? To our shame, Gilead is here, in England now.