Why Reading The Handmaid’s Tale Is Now Scarier Than Ever
This Dystopian Novel Was Written in 1985 — How Is It Still Relevant Today?
By Jessica Nguyen
Image credits: Cindy Sims, Wikipedia Commons
This article was originally published on jessicafilmpotpourri.com
When I originally read The Handmaid’s Tale in ninth grade, all I could think about was how weird it was that Offred fell in love with someone she played a few games of Scrabble with.
Now, when I read the book, I feel uneasy; as if I’m watching that Simpsons episode that predicted the Capitol riot.
The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian novel written way before its time in 1985 by Margaret Atwood.
Margaret Atwood studied at Radcliffe College, a now-retired all women’s institution in the previously all-male Harvard College. Now, I include this because it provides an interesting insight into how Atwood was able to create a dystopian world that so specifically frightens women in a way that wouldn’t frighten men. With Atwood studying and living in an all-women’s campus in her college formative years, it’s no wonder how she was able to write a book emulating a woman’s worst nightmare.
The book came out shortly after a time that Ivy League colleges started to accept women into their schools. Yale- 1969. Harvard- 1975. Columbia- 1983. So, what took these Ivy Leagues so long to start admitting women? Well, they simply didn’t want to. In one edition of Yale’s alumni magazine, a graduate is quoted saying, “Gentlemen — let’s face it — charming as women are — they get to be a drag if you are forced to associate with them each and every day…he wants to concentrate on the basic principles of thermodynamics, but she keeps trying to gossip about the idiotic trivia all women try to impose on men.” But that’s not all. One Dartmouth alum in a letter written in 1970 bluntly states, “For God’s sake, for Dartmouth’s sake, and for everyone’s sake, keep the damned women out.” This infamous quote actually became the title to Nancy Weiss Malkiel’s book Keep the Damned Women Out: The Struggle for Coeducation where she did a historic breakdown on how America and Britain’s colleges went to bite the bullet and become coed. How brave of them.
To think: not only is Atwood an accomplished writer who studied at Harvard, but she was one of the pioneering female students that changed what an Ivy League student could look like.
Her novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, tells the story of an overturned United States that is now controlled by a group called the Gilead, a radical quasi-Christian dictatorship. Because of the increasing infertility rate, fertile or “fruitful” women are forced to become handmaidens or “two-legged wombs’’ and produce children with the ruling men of society called commanders.
The terror of this book comes from its world where women no longer have a right to own their bodies — but has this fictional plot now become the reality of our near future?
In 1970, the US Supreme Court (USSC) Roe v. Wade case was filed by Jane Roe when she was denied the right to have an abortion in Texas. The case was then appealed to the USSC with the legal question, “Does the Constitution recognize a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy by abortion?” It was decided by the USSC that yes, a women’s right to have an abortion was protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision was ultimately backed by the government’s interest to protect the mother as well as “the potentiality of human life.”
However, a recent case has come to light, and now with a conservative majority US Supreme Court, this likely will be the time that conservative pro-life interest groups start to push for more abortion restrictions and possibly overturn Roe v. Wade.
South Carolina has just passed the first abortion ban of 2021 — adding stress onto its residents’ already existing worries about the availability of the COVID-19 pandemic vaccine. Because there isn’t a better time to start pressing the courts about pro-life issues than now, right? According to Planned Parenthood, this legislation could ban almost all abortions for the nearly 1 million South Carolinians of reproductive age.
Just before South Carolina’s ban, the USSC put in federal requirements for abortions where women have to pick up the medication in person — a requirement made in January of this year amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. While the requirement does not seem to be as extreme as an abortion ban, it shows the court’s implicit attitude concerning the issue. Among three other justices, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the dissenting opinion,
“This country’s laws have long singled out abortions for more onerous treatment than other medical procedures that carry similar or greater risks.. maintaining the F.D.A.’s in-person requirements during the pandemic not only treats abortion exceptionally, it imposes an unnecessary, irrational and unjustifiable undue burden on women seeking to exercise their right to choose.”
As previously stated, bringing up pro-life issues is as enticing as they can be now with the conservative super-majority supreme court in place.
So, what does the future look like for Roe v. Wade? Are rights to a women’s body invalid once they’ve become mothers, or is there a certain distinction that must be made in order to protect “the potentiality of human life”? Regardless, I believe that The Handmaiden’s Tale will resurge soon into mainstream media along with new discussion on the pro-life v. pro-choice movement.
