Atwood vs. Atavism? The Handmaid’s Tale and Its Flagrant Misrepresentation of the Christian Right

Totalitarianism

George Orwell's book 1984, first published in 1949, has had a notable impact in English-speaking countries. Attempts by governments to limit the flow of politically relevant information, for example, are commonly referred to as "Orwellian." Orwell contributed to the widespread belief that totalitarianism stifles humanity and makes life unbearable. Thus his book has had a positive impact. Some citizens, at least, are more leery of their governments, and more watchful of possible infringements of their freedom. Orwell's fictional account of totalitarian society has had a real-world political impact, to some degree bolstering a healthy libertarian distrust of expansionist government.

One of Canada's most famous authors, Margaret Atwood, has more recently written a book in the same genre as Orwell. The Handmaid's Tale, first published in 1985, is also a fictional account of a totalitarian society, and it is intended to induce fear of a contemporary political movement: the Christian Right. The totalitarian society that Atwood describes is supposed to be what the United States would be like after the Christian Right seizes power. As she portrays it, a society under the political control of the Christian Right would be sinister, oppressive, and extremely hypocritical.

If The Handmaid's Tale would wallow in the obscurity of most modern fiction it would not be worthy of notice. However, it is not an obscure work. Instead, it has won awards including Canada's most prestigious award for fiction, the Governor General's Award, as well as the Los Angeles Times' Best Fiction Award. And according to Mary Ellen Snodgrass in Cliff Notes on the Handmaid's Tale (New York, 1994), more than one million paperback copies have been sold in the United States alone (p. 8). Although written by a Canadian, this book is well known in the United States, and is apparently used in some American universities. Thus it cannot be ignored. It's likely that many people in both the United States and Canada have had their view of the Christian Right influenced by this book. Unfortunately, Atwood's representation of the Christian Right is so warped that readers of her book receive an incredibly inaccurate impression of the movement.