“This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.”
11&more has been avidly watching Hulu’s new TV series, “The Handmaid’s Tale”, based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian masterpiece. Many of us read the novel in high school and, while haunted by it for decades afterwards, did not fully grasp its significance until now. The adaptation depicts the totalitarian theocracy of Gilead, in which the few remaining fertile women or “handmaids” are forced to serve as reproductive slaves for wealthy couples, and has a chilling renewed relevance in 2017. We now live in a world where the president of the United States has openly demeaned women, racial and religious intolerance is pervasive, and a woman’s right to choose is still under assault in many parts of the country as well as globally. The series has provoked a number of interesting questions: Is the Handmaid’s Tale a feminist story or simply a humanist one? Why exactly is it so relevant and resonant today? And what do we make of the showrunners’ deliberate choice to represent Gilead, a deeply racist regime in the book, as race-neutral on the screen? We consider these questions and more…
Is The Handmaid’s Tale a feminist story? What do we think about the cast’s alleged sidestepping of the ‘feminist’ question?
“When Elisabeth Moss was asked how many similarities she sees between The Handmaid’s Tale’s Offred and her old Mad Men heroine, Peggy Olson, she veered back to the previous question.
“Well, they’re both human beings. They’re the same height,” she quipped, adding later, “For me, [The Handmaid’s Tale is] not a feminist story. It’s a human story because women’s rights are human rights… I never intended to play Peggy as a feminist. I never intended to play Offred as a feminist. They’re women, and they’re humans…”
Ahalya (Finance consultant based in San Francisco. Forced to read “The Handmaid’s Tale” for high school English reading list, but ended up haunted by it for decades after):
This NewYorker article challenges the cast’s refusal to acknowledge the series as feminist:
“All this smacks of some Gilead-style prohibition. Had the cast members been explicitly instructed to distance themselves from the feminism label, maybe for marketing purposes? That seems improbable, considering that in our age of pussy-grabbing Presidents and pussyhats, the word has been rehabilitated from its commercially toxic status and spun into marketing gold…
Still, echoed by the cast of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the disavowal amounts to a deeply strange evasion of the themes that animate the book and the show. Women’s rights are indeed human rights. But the ways in which women are deprived of those rights—in Atwood’s fiction, and in the reality, past and present, that she bases it on—are unique.”
I absolutely think the series is “feminist”. Everyone has their own definitions of feminism so I understand some of the confusion – but, all I know is that when I observe patriarchal corporate politics or a president who openly insults and degrades women, or network news anchors who assault women and manage to get away with it (landing huge pay checks in the process), then I feel it is my duty to identify as feminist and fight against this repression and prejudice. And that’s why I think this adaptation is so relevant despite being terrifying and uncomfortable to watch.
Jia Jia (Transformation consultant based in New York. Read “The Handmaid’s Tale” in middle school and loved it):
Atwood gives a very nuanced exploration of how her novel relates to notions of feminism and our current reality in this article. Feminism seems to be a central theme that pulls in myriad threads about human beings and human systems—tyranny, psychology, hope and the transmission of stories through witness literature.
Atwood talks about writing the book while she was in West Berlin in 1984, and infusing into it her understanding of the wariness, silence, sense of being watched, oblique conversation and frequent change of subject that she’d witnessed during her travels behind the Iron Curtain. She talks about her understanding that tyranny can literally happen anywhere, because she had been a child during WWII. And she talks about women as being central, not peripheral to human history, and of oppressive and extermination-oriented systems focusing on the control of women.
In her words:
“Is “The Handmaid’s Tale” a “feminist” novel? If you mean an ideological tract in which all women are angels and/or so victimized they are incapable of moral choice, no. If you mean a novel in which women are human beings — with all the variety of character and behavior that implies — and are also interesting and important, and what happens to them is crucial to the theme, structure and plot of the book, then yes. In that sense, many books are “feminist.”
I love this over-arching yet nuanced definition of feminism. She refuses to simplify and ideologize her position. And I think that’s completely in-keeping with the spirit of the book—subverting systems that seek to impose a singular stance or mode of thinking.
What do we think about the show’s deliberate decision to depict Gilead as race neutral? Is it effective or jarring?
Joy (Lifelong fan of Margaret Atwood and dystopian fiction):
One of the things that caused a disjuncture for me was that it’s hard to imagine this dystopian fundamentalist Christian future as race-neutral.
Don’t get me wrong; that’s not necessarily a critique of the show. It’s how the book was written, and I would have been irritated if they had tried to re-write Atwood’s novel to shoe-horn it in. But, still, the history of Christianity in the U.S. and the Americas in general is inextricable from white supremacy and eurocentrism. The Las Casas/Sepulveda debate over whether Natives had souls that could be converted to Christianity was fundamental to the logic and structure of colonization. Forced conversion and The Bible were some of the primary ideological tools used to justify and perpetuate slavery, and modern evangelical fundamentalism is very racially coded.
My off-the-cuff judgment for why you don’t see that in the source material is the author herself. I like Atwood quite a lot and follow her on The Social Medias; I see her as trying to continue educating herself and be increasingly involved in efforts towards racial justice (especially Idle No More).
But, The Handmaid’s Tale strikes me, looking back on a book that I did not read with this lens when I was in high school, as a very white feminist book. And, to be frank, I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that now that the show has dropped.
As science fiction, that happens all of the time. The point of the genre is not necessarily or only to create a straightforward sociopolitical critique directly mappable onto our current context. The point is more to play with possibilities–how do we think about our world, selves, and relationships if we upend or bend some of the common sense social structures and contexts that we’re used to? So, as a sci-fi novel, exploring gender oppression in a dystopian race-neutral world makes sense to me.
However, this is a show that is being made in 2017, and we already have buzzfeed-esque interviewers asking stars on the red carpet “was this said by Republicans or characters in The Handmaid’s Tale” questions.
The show is deliberately and explicitly political, and framed as directly relevant to our current moment. Which I think it very much is. This is what creeped me out while watching the series. The slow, insidious normalization, and how we protest, and get indignant, but don’t really believe it’s happening until it’s too late.
During the recent Berkeley protests, I could feel in my gut the face-off with riot cops…they already fire on peaceful protestors with sandbag bullets and some days we don’t feel far off from getting AK-47s turned on us.
So, it IS relevant, and the parallels that are being made are apt and viscerally terrifying. But, I worry that it is going to be mostly used as an indictment of this regime’s anti-woman and anti-LGBT+ policies, erasing the fundamental white supremacy of this regime and evangelicalism more broadly.
Jia Jia:
The race-neutrality of Gilead is an invention of the TV series. Check out this article about differences between show and book, including diversity:
“In the book, the leaders of Gilead separate people of different races, much as the Nazis did. We’re told non-white people “were removed from society and resettled in ‘the National Homelands.'” (Likely they were killed or enslaved.) In the series, many of the characters are non-white, including June’s husband, daughter and best friend…
Miller said the change felt necessary in this day and age. “That was a very big discussion with Margaret about what the difference was between reading the words, ‘There are no people of color in this world’ and seeing an all-white world on your television, which has a very different impact,” Miller said of the change. “What’s the difference between making a TV show about racists and making a racist TV show where you don’t hire any actors of color?”
Before I read that quote from Miller, I was turning over the exact same quandary in my mind. Since Gilead is so racist, there are only white people. And if you faithfully re-create that, you get a show with just white people. Which then feels racist to the progressive viewer today. All-white casts are fine for period dramas because we mentally put them into “the past—what’s done” and disconnect it from our present.
But shows about the future, no matter how far-fetched, utopic or dystopian, are extensions of the present and have to relate. And doing a show that’s all white, even though that IS the point, at a time when the media is still too white, is an interesting challenge.
Part of me wishes they’d stuck with the book but I also feel the show would lose relatability with a significant portion of the audience. I’ve been noticing that in myself over the past few years, I’ve become really disinterested in shows that feel super “white” culturally, because it’s just not relevant to the multicultural experience I’ve had. And I suspect that enough other people feel the same way for smart TV execs to refine their approach to shows. In this case, it kind of works and it kind of backfires.
Joy:
I’d forgotten that bit of the book. Makes Gilead even creepier.
That’s an interesting insight. I think given that background the changes from book to show make more sense. It seems like they changed enough to make it legible/relevant and less problematic on the screen, but still stuck to the original feel and intent. I still retain my original concerns, not about the show, per se, but the way I predict it will be taken up in popular commentary….but I think that’s actually a rock-and-a-hard-place issue that they weren’t going to be able to resolve anyway.
Interestingly, Samira Wiley (the actress who plays Moira) agrees with a lot of us on how they had to change the casting to reflect the show taking place in 2017.
“All of the choices were very conscious, but one thing that I think was very smart was that the book was written as a dystopian future. The show is written as if it’s taking place right now, in 2017. … I think those choices reflect the world that we are living in right now. It wants to reflect the people your kids play with. The people you go to school with. To rid ourselves of the people who are meshed into our society would be kind of weird…”
Ahalya:
This article criticizes the show’s attitude towards race and makes several of the same arguments as you Joy, with this interesting additional insight about the show’s treatment of Moira relative to its white protagonists:
“…Moira’s interiority as a queer black woman, forced to have sex with men at a brothel in order to survive, is never given focus. The narrative turn seems blissfully unaware of the Jezebel stereotype that has haunted black women since times of slavery…Even more frustrating is that Moira has sanded off her edges in order to survive, while June is now positioned as the feminist radical willing to aid the resistance movement, Mayday. These decisions are a way to avoid exploring the horror she experiences head-on, as the series has done for the white women in Moira’s orbit. Just witness the camera’s relationship with Moira versus other characters. In particularly complex emotional moments for June, Janine, and even Serena Joy, they are framed in extreme close-up, which feels like a more intimate way to communicate their point of view than even voice-over. Moira gets no shots like this. There is an emotional removal in regards to how the camera interacts with her compared to the aforementioned white women, whose perspectives become important to the narrative to varying degrees. It almost feels like a reminder to the viewer that Moira is an appendage to someone else’s story.”
Joy:
Interesting—the article raises points I hadn’t noticed with respect to filmography of its Black characters.
I remain conflicted on whether or not bringing the intersections of racialized and gendered violence into the original book would have made sense for Atwood. Even though I’m of the opinion that writers can sometimes deal well with topics that are not their lived experience, I think the original book worked well as it was. I’m not convinced that Atwood would have had the nuance of insight into the gender-based violence faced by Black women in the U.S. as, say, a Toni Morrison, and trying to achieve a complex rendering of race in America would probably have fallen flat in the novel.
How this dynamic has been translated to the show, however, is tricky. The casting directors and screenwriters have grown up steeped in a culture where we have devoured racial tropes along with our breakfast cereal since we were toddlers. They are creating a show for an audience that will interpret the explicit or implicit message of the show through these same racialized lenses. Even their need to enact the pretense that this fictional dystopia is “post-racial” is in itself a product of this upbringing. The casting, the filming choices, the character placement in a scene, the too-deliberate race-neutrality….race is the elephant in the room, and not naming it almost makes it worse. It gives the series the power to reinforce the very systems of power and oppression that it purports to critique. Especially in a series about slavery, oppression, sex, and power. The fact that they chose not to put certain scenes of interracial sexual violence on the screen (based on what I’ve seen so far) shows that they realize the dangerous memories or associations these images would trigger in the audience.
This whole discussion is particularly salient considering that Atwood determined that she wouldn’t invent any elements of this dystopia that hadn’t actually happened in real life. And the elements of sex- and gender-based violence have so much resonance with what actually did happen to Black women in the U.S. during (and after) slavery that the omission just….echoes.
Jia Jia:
I think it only made sense for Atwood to write the book in a way that was true to her. If the intersection of racialized and gendered violence wasn’t something she deeply contemplated while writing the novel—which, judging from the book, it wasn’t—then she shouldn’t have written about it. Trying to represent political sensitivities and nuances that you don’t deeply feel is false. And that’s terrible art. Remember, we’re looking back at her book with over thirty years of hindsight. Expecting a book written in 1985 to reflect the conversations of 2017 feels anachronistic to me, and weirdly ideological—as if we’re insisting that all cultural artifacts through history should reflect our contemporary point of view, not their own.
This anachronism is where the book-to-screen translation hits a snag, in my view. The show producers wanted to be “relatable” to contemporary audiences by incorporating people of color into the story. Merely seeing these people onscreen might be enough for contemporary white audiences to find the show relatable, but it’s not for contemporary audiences of color, who need believable characters of color in believable contexts. Thoroughly weaving racial dynamics into Atwood’s white-only supremacist society would require a deep re-write that would fundamentally change the nature of Gilead. And I’m not sure how I feel about that. Because I suspect that re-writing Gilead to Atwood’s standard of quality is very tough.
So at the end of the day, as an Asian woman who often turns off my person of color identity in order to identify with white male protagonists, I’m ok with the TV adaptation’s nod to race, but I certainly understand the broader critique. I just think we need a LOT more content that’s about non-white-male people so we don’t feel that any one piece needs to get everything absolutely right.
And finally, what about the show’s attitude towards religion?
Joy:
On this note, I saw someone tweeting at Atwood recently about “how dare she disrespect Christianity, and when was she going to make a show critical of Muslims”…..it was like a strange meta-moment of someone who seems to be wholly clueless about the exact horrifying way they play exactly into what Atwood was trying to critique.
Jia Jia:
Wow. Well that person should probably read this article I referenced upfront. Because in it Atwood addresses three questions that she says are frequently asked of her:
- Is “The Handmaid’s Tale” a “feminist” novel?
- Is “The Handmaid’s Tale” antireligion?
- Is “The Handmaid’s Tale” a prediction?
She sums up her answer to 2 beautifully:
“…the book is not ‘antireligion.’ It is against the use of religion as a front for tyranny; which is a different thing altogether.”
She wanted to explore what a tyrannical system might look like in America, so she used the dominant cultural symbols of this society i.e. Christian symbols.
Ugh…I feel like we really need to find a way for people to talk in order to share ideas and communicate, instead of judge and argue. Social media has been quite good at unleashing the provocative and opinionated side of ourselves: label and judge first, think later or never. In Atwood’s tyrannical world, no dissenting opinion is tolerated—it’s a sort of extreme order. The other side of that coin is having all opinions and no consensus, which if it leads to chaos, could trigger a return to extreme order. And that brings us full loop back to dystopia.
Tags: atwood dystopia handmaid's tale oppression prejudice racism racism; trump women's rights
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