Our Dystopic Reality: Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (Re)Signified in Today's America

Lecture Center 19

This project explores a text’s evolution beyond itself, specifically its movement into and through the digital sphere and embodied resistance. It does so by tracing historical American oppressions to their modern iteration: a dystopia. While Margaret Atwood’s seminal 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, has long been studied as exemplifying dystopic and feminist literature, its recent resurgence in Trump’s America has not been critically studied. Since its publication, various (re)imaginations have been created including Hulu’s 2017 scripted series. Most provocatively, however, are the recent uptakes of the handmaid’s costume by political protesters. I examine this use of costume to explore the function of literature as a resistance tool. By turning to Atwood’s satirical use of Puritanism and 1980s Christian conservatism, I unpack specific histories of sexism and racism grounding America today. As such, I argue that Handmaid’s no longer forewarns dystopia, but rather reflects our dystopic reality. Furthermore, I argue that protesters’ power does not exist within the costumes signaling Handmaid’s, but rather within the act of putting on the costume. Paradoxically, the costume is both provocative in its invocation of Atwood’s fiction and simultaneously meaningless as it is subsumed by a dystopic reality it attempts to call out.