1. Background Information
Handmaid’s Tale
Background Information

2. Margaret Atwood
Born in 1939, grew up in northern Quebec and did not attend school until 8th grade
Her father was an etymologist and she spent much of her childhood in the woods of Quebec. When her mother bought her a book of fairy tales, she bought Grimm’s Fairy Tales
Read, wrote and used imagination voraciously
Attended the University of Toronto and Harvard and taught at various universities including New York University

3. Margaret Atwood
Considers herself a humanist – someone who places critical thinking and empiricism over doctrine and faith.
1987 Humanist of the Year
“People’s true religion is what they worship, whether it’s called a church or not. If you’re dedicated, for instance, to the stock market to the exclusion of all else, you have a religion of the stock market [ ] whether you recognize that’s what you’re doing or not.”
Dislikes terms like feminism even though her novels often warn of the dangers of patriarchy

4. Historical and Literary Context
Penned in West Berlin and Alabama
Displays her (and others’) fears of fundamentalist totalitarian regimes and the potential effects of giving up liberties for security worldwide and offers a satire of social, religious and political trends in the U.S. in the 1980’s – conservative revival, militant nationalism, etc.
Election of Raegan and Thatcher – conservative revival
Social services for women disproportionately cut
Women in power disproportionately decreasing, etc.
See Neuman, Shirley. “’Just a Backlash’: Margaret Atwood, Feminism, and The Handmaid’s Tale.” University of Toronto Quarterly Summer

5. Historical and Literary Context
70’s and 80’s saw rise of terrorism, terrorist groups – plane hijacking, kidnapping . . .
Rise of religious extremism stateside and abroad
Falwell, Robertson, etc.
Ebb in progress towards women’s rights
Cold War & culture of fear

6. Historical and Literary Context
“There's nothing in the book that hasn't already happened.”
AIDS
Nuclear plant accidents
Banning of abortion and birth control in parts of the world (Romania) state limitation of birth in others (China)
Pharmaceutical mishaps/side-effects (Thalidomide)
Holocaust, Trail of Tears, Slavery, etc.

7. Themes and Motifs Consequences of reversing woman’s rights
Objectification of woman’s bodies
Individual vs. State
Dangers of totalitarianism, fundamentalism, and religious intolerance
false use of religion in politics
Machiavellian power for power’s sake
Mind Control: psychological manipulation and the power of language
(and the role of technology in all of the above)

8. Setting 1980’s Cambridge, Massachusetts -- Harvard
Atwood said she chose the most unlikely place because these things tend to occur where we least expect them
1st person POV in the form of a journal or memoir
Handmaid’s Tale has been made into a movie, opera, ballet, and now a Hulu miniseries