The Handmaid's Tale: Context (OCR A Level English Literature)

The Handmaid’s Tale: Context

Context should inform, but should never dominate, your reading of the text. Any comments on context must consider the significance and influence of the contexts in which the text was written and received. When exploring context for The Handmaid’s Tale, you should consider primarily the literary context, and then include any other relevant contexts as appropriate to the question. Each of the topics below link directly to the key themes and ideas in The Handmaid’s Tale:

• Literacy context

• Social context

• Historical context

Literary context

When considering a novel’s literary context, it is important to explore the form and genre it is written in, as well as anything the novel might do that defies the expectations of a particular genre. The Handmaid’s Tale can be thought of as a piece of dystopian fiction, science fiction or speculative fiction. The sections below will explore each of these literary contexts in relation to the novel in more detail.

Dystopian fiction

• In order to comment on distinctive features and trends of their own societies, writers can invent utopias (good or perfect societies) or dystopias (otherwise known as anti-utopias):

  • In a dystopian society, the conditions of human life are bleak, through deprivation, oppression or terror (or all three)

• Dystopian fiction tends to contain many of the same narrative features: 

  • Patriarchal rule

  • An imagined near-future setting

  • Oppression, social control and loss of identity or individuality

  • Surveillance and mistrust

  • The use of censorship, propaganda and indoctrination

  • Totalitarian rule

  • Desensitisation to violence

• They are almost always allegories:

  • These are stories that comment on and criticise contemporary society or situations to serve as a warning about how things will develop if nothing changes

• The Handmaid’s Tale is set in a futuristic USA at the beginning of the 21st century:

  • It functions as a warning based on Atwood’s concerns about the world around her at the time of writing (in the 1980s)

• It features all of the key characteristics of dystopian fiction, as well as control through language:

  • The meanings of words are changed to their opposites

  • For example, Atwood uses the word “Aunts”, which has reassuring and comforting connotations, and subverts it, using the word to label people in her world who are key instruments of oppression

  • A direct contextual link can be drawn here with Orwell’s use of “Newspeak” in 1984

• Those who founded Gilead did so through the idealistic but misguided expectation that their new regime would improve human life and the future of the humanity:

  • However, it failed to factor in the expectations, principles and behaviours of real people

• The control or manipulation of technology was a means to strip the rights and freedoms of women in this new, super-patriarchal reality:

  • The perversion of technology and its uses is another typical feature of dystopian literature

  • Atwood does not imagine futuristic and far-fetched technology

  • Instead she alludes to the possibility of extreme social control using technology current to the 1980s

• Once established, Gilead does not rely on technology in order to exert its power and control over its citizens:

  • In many ways, it is the lack of technology that is another way of the regime removing power from people, via the lack of access to information

  • Gileadean ideology seems to be more of a reaction against technological progress rather than an example of it

• The narrative perspective of the novel is different from traditional dystopian literature, as the protagonist is relegated to the margins of society and confined to domestic spaces:

  • Offred does not know what is happening beyond her immediate surroundings, and has to rely on snatched bits of information

  • Due to Offred’s ignorance, the reader only learns of Gilead’s political philosophy and its mechanisms via the male voice in the Historical Notes

• In this sense, The Handmaid’s Tale could be considered a form of “feminine dystopia”, as the choice of a female narrator and the story being told through a narrow female lens subverts the traditional masculine dystopian genre:

  • This does not necessarily make the character of Offred a “feminist” in the politically active sense of the word, as she does not engage in active resistance

  • Instead, she is more focused on her physical and mental survival, rebelling in a more subtle way

Science fiction

• While The Handmaid’s Tale does not contain the more fantastical elements of science fiction, such as space or time travel, it does share some characteristics - namely the question of ‘what if…?’

• Science fiction as a genre often contains speculation about humanity’s future, the impact of science and technology on society, and settings in an alternate time and place

• In a politicised and controlled society, the novel imagines an alternate USA:

  • The use of past memories and present narrative offers the reader a type of time travel, highlighting just how easy it would be for society to become something like the regime of Gilead

  • In addition, the Historical Notes section is set several decades into the future

  • The use of near- and far-future are both well-recognised traits of science fiction

• Atwood herself has said that science fiction is about “now” as there are so many possibilities about the future no one can know which one is going to happen:

  • However, she is rejected classifying the novel as outright science fiction, considering it instead to be a work of “speculative fiction”

Speculative fiction

• Atwood makes a clear distinction between science fiction and speculative fiction, in that she considers speculative fiction to be something that could really happen without much stretch of the imagination

• Speculative fiction uses an intentionally unsettling blend of the familiar to evoke a warning based on current political, social, economic or religious trends

• Atwood made a rule of not including anything that hadn’t already happened somewhere in the world in The Handmaid’s Tale

• Allusions to historical events such as Hitler’s Third Reich remind the reader that extreme totalitarian dictatorships have happened before:

  • This technique makes the novel chillingly plausible

• Atwood also makes the setting of the novel look familiar, basing it on a real place: Cambridge, Massachusetts:

  • These techniques remind us to resist complacency and to understand that civil stability is never guaranteed

• Atwood satirises various trends she observed in the 1980s, such as the poor treatment of women and the corruption of religion for political purposes:

  • For example, the novel considers what would happen if contemporary society’s increasingly inclusive and liberal attitudes towards sex provoked a severe backlash, favouring factions who believe in the repression and control of women’s sexuality

• The Handmaid’s Tale suggests that, given a certain set of circumstances (in this case, the rise of the religious right together with a declining birth rate), a totalitarian regime could emerge within our lifetimes

Social context

A novel’s social context can be thought of as the social and political environment in which it was written, and the social and political environment in which it is understood. Atwood’s influences include politics and religion in the US and feminism. Both of these aspects of social context are explored in more detail below.

Politics and religion

• At the time of writing, in the 1980s, religious right-wing fundamentalist groups were growing in influence in America:

  • These groups were generally characterised by a strong backing for President Reagan and the Republican Party, who valued conservatism and “family values”

  • “Family values” equated to traditional, heterosexual nuclear families

  • He appealed to white, working-class Americans who felt racist resentment against the advances black people had made during the civil rights movement

  • Reagan also appealed to religious groups such as the Moral Majority, who pushed for a return to traditional ideas such as the role of women as housewives and no sex outside of marriage

  • They also resisted abortion and LGBTQ rights

• Today’s readers might receive the novel in the context of more recent President Trump’s authoritarian tendencies and his vice-president’s anti-abortion beliefs

• In addition, in June 2022, the Supreme Court overturned the constitutionally protected right to access abortion in the US, leaving the question of how to regulate abortion to individual states:

  • Millions of women and girls now live in US states where access to abortion is either heavily restricted or totally inaccessible

• The first cases of HIV and AIDS in the US were reported in 1980:

  • At the time Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, the prognosis for AIDS was death within a year of diagnosis

  • Public fears about AIDS fed into Christian right propaganda that opposed sex outside of marriage, and homosexuality

  • This propaganda likely inspired the political backdrop of Gilead

  • In the Historical Notes, the reader learns that the reduced fertility rate in Gilead was as a result of a sexually transmitted disease

Feminism

• Feminism is the term for anything concerning the rights of women and gender equality

• The Western feminist movement is generally seen to be divided into four waves:

  • The First Wave started with the suffrage movement in the mid-19th to early 20th centuries

  • The Second Wave, during the mid-20th century, was characterised by advocacy for women’s rights in the workplace, in marriage and in society more generally

    • More feminist organisations were founded, and abortion was legalised in the US (via the Roe vs. Wade legal case in 1973)

  • The Third Wave relates roughly to the period from the 1990s to the 2010s, and is characterised by the abolition of gender stereotypes, the expansion of discussion about violence against women, the reclamation of derogatory terms and more emphasis on race, class and transgender rights

  • The Fourth Wave covers from roughly the 2010s until the present, and is characterisation by the rejection of gender norms and binaries, the utilisation of social media for activism and movements such as #MeToo

• Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale during the 1980s, during Second Wave feminism:

  • Women were beginning to embrace lives that existed outside of the traditional, domestic sphere

  • In Gilead, those in charge want a return to the pre-Second Wave conditions of domesticity and strict gender roles

  • Atwood viewed this as a setback from the progress that feminists had made

• Offred’s flashbacks and memories of her mother includes the rise of Second Wave feminism and the anti-feminist backlash of New Right Christian fundamentalism

• The voices of the women in the novel represent both traditional feminine and new feminist positions (as represented by Moira and Offred’s mother)

• There is some implied criticism of more radical feminism in the novel, which calls for a radical change to society where male supremacy is removed completely:

  • The reader can infer that Offred’s mother was a feminist activist, as she supported a protest which burnt pornographic books

  • These were feminists protesting the misogynistic nature of such material

  • Even Moira, although working at Jezebel’s, uses wit to undermine sexism

• Therefore, two of the main women in Offred’s life are representations of active feminism, and yet Offred seems to observe their fight and politics from a distance:

  • It is left to the reader to consider whether Offred could be considered a feminist via her subversive behaviour rather than active resistance

Historical context

While background knowledge of the historical context in which a text was written and received is useful, any reference to historical context should be made judiciously and linked carefully to the themes in the novel and the focus of the exam question. Below you will find some comments about historical context relevant to the key themes and ideas in the novel.

• Atwood was born and raised in Canada, spending much of her childhood in the countryside:

  • This helped to foster an interest in the environment, and has often spoken about the ways in which climate change could make existing inequalities in society worse

• In the 1970s, harmful pesticides began to be banned by the US government, and there was an increase in awareness of the environmental problems caused by the use of pesticides and chemicals:

  • This theme is highlighted in the novel, such as when Offred mentions that grocery stores like “Loaves and Fishes” rarely open anymore because the seas are so polluted that there are no longer enough fish

• Atwood also had an interest in 17th-century American Puritanism in New England:

  • In particular, the Salem witch trials, in which her relative Mary Webster was hanged for being a witch, but survived

  • The novel features hangings on the Wall for those whose crime is being “labelled”

• Many of the practices of Gilead are reminiscent of those of the Puritans, who lived in a rigid theocracy based on a few choice selections from the Bible:

  • For example, Gilead’s attitudes towards women as an inferior sex are directly linked to a Puritan mindset

  • New England Puritan women were often assigned names such as “Silence”, “Patience”, “Comfort” and “Fear”

• The use of Cambridge, Massachusetts as the inspiration for the setting of Gilead allowed Atwood to indirectly link fictional Gilead with the historical Puritan society created hundreds of years earlier:

  • However, the novel does not directly name a setting which broadens its appeal, suggesting that such authoritarianism could arise anywhere

• In addition, televangelists were popular in the US during the 1970s and 1980s, and the gospel evangelist Tammy Faye Bakker is often cited as a possible model for Serena Joy