Dystopia at its Finest: A Review of The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

ByPeter Joeseph 'Briefcase Maker' Kalafatis
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The Handmaid’s Tale began as a handwritten draft titled Offred, written in West Berlin in the spring of 1984. Margaret Atwood replaced the title in pen early in 1985, before the novel was finished, and very little else changed: a University of Toronto Fisher Library exhibit says only two archival boxes of drafts exist.

What came out of that draft is set in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after a fundamentalist coup has turned the United States into the Republic of Gilead. Fertile women there are assigned to ruling households as Handmaids, and the narrator, Offred, is one of them. Atwood says every piece of it has a precedent in real life. The book has since been adapted for film, opera, ballet, graphic novel and television, challenged in school libraries, and carried into statehouses as a red robe and a bonnet.

Atwood, Berlin and the First Edition

Atwood was born on November 18, 1939, in Ottawa, Ontario, and wrote the novel in West Berlin and Alabama in the mid-1980s, according to SparkNotes. It was her sixth novel. McClelland & Stewart published it in Canada in fall 1985, and Houghton Mifflin brought it out in the United States in 1986, per the Fisher exhibit.

The date matters to how it reads. The same context page places the writing just after the elections of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, during a conservative revival partly driven by religious conservatives, which sharpened feminist fears that earlier gains could be reversed. The novel also reflects 1980s worries about falling birthrates, nuclear power and environmental damage.

Recognition came fast. The Canadian Encyclopedia lists the Governor General’s Award for 1985, a Booker Prize nomination and a Nebula Award nomination in 1986, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987. The Fisher exhibit adds that it has reportedly sold more than eight million copies.

What Happens in Gilead (Spoilers Ahead)

Offred serves in the household of a Commander and his wife, Serena Joy, a former gospel singer and advocate of traditional values. Her account is stitched together with memories of the Rachel and Leah Re-education Center, which its inmates called the Red Center. There Aunt Lydia taught the women that subordination and childbearing offered more respect and safety than the old society had. Offred’s friend Moira escapes the Center, then turns up working at Jezebel’s, having chosen that over being sent to the Colonies (all from SparkNotes’ plot summary).

Inside the house, the Commander summons Offred to his study for Scrabble and old magazines, Vogue among them. Serena Joy arranges for her to sleep with Nick, the gardener and chauffeur, in exchange for a promised picture of Offred’s daughter. Ofglen, the Handmaid she shops with, belongs to an underground group called Mayday. At the end a black van from the Eyes pulls up, Nick says the men inside are Mayday, and Offred steps into it, headed for prison or for freedom. She does not know which.

Then the register changes. An epilogue set in 2195, long after Gilead has fallen, presents a lecture by Professor Pieixoto, who describes the regime in cool, analytical language. Offred’s account, he reports, survives on cassette tapes found in Bangor, Maine. He suggests Nick arranged her escape. Her fate stays unknown.

Handwritten manuscript draft with a crossed-out title beside archival boxes and a desk lamp

Nothing Invented From Scratch

Atwood has said the book follows one rule. In a Rolling Stone interview about the television adaptation, she put it this way:

“nothing goes in that doesn’t have a precedent in real life”

(Margaret Atwood, quoted in Rolling Stone.)

The Wikipedia entry on the novel collects the precedents Atwood has named: the 1978–79 revolution in Iran and its dress code; Romania’s Decree 770 under Nicolae Ceaușescu, which outlawed birth control and abortion and put pregnant women under close watch; state killings of dissidents in the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos; Afghanistan’s theocracy, which pushed women out of public life; and the Puritan New England of her own ancestors. The dedication goes to one of them, Mary Webster, who was accused of witchcraft and survived her hanging.

Even the title carries a borrowed shape. It echoes the parts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a set of connected stories, and the fairy-tale habit of letting the central character tell her own.

Ordinary Is What You Are Used To

“Ordinary,” said Aunt Lydia, “is what you are used to.”

(Aunt Lydia, end of Chapter 6, as quoted by SparkNotes.)

The line comes as Offred and Ofglen stand at the Wall, looking at the bodies of men hanged there. It is also a description of method. Gilead does not need to be believed. It needs to be repeated until the shock wears off, and the novel’s slow dread comes from watching a person’s baseline move.

The book is as interested in who enforces the order as in who suffers under it. Serena Joy once campaigned for the values that now confine her. Aunt Lydia runs the indoctrination and supervises the group execution. Complicity runs through the women’s side of the house as much as through the Commander’s study.

The resistance that survives is small. A previous Handmaid scratched a line of Latin into the back of a cupboard in Offred’s room (LitCharts). It reads Nolite te bastardes carborundorum, and the Commander calls it a schoolboy joke (SparkNotes) and translates it as “don’t let the bastards grind you down.” Offred’s own act of resistance is the telling itself, recorded onto cassette tapes that outlast Gilead.

The Reviewers Who Pushed Back

Not everyone was persuaded in 1986. Mary McCarthy’s review in the New York Times that February doubted the premise. She wrote, “Surely the essential element of a cautionary tale is recognition,” and said she could not see the intolerance of the far right producing such a state, as Flavorwire summarized in 2017. She also argued that a book whose lesson is that the old order keeps returning makes a poor warning, since a warning is supposed to describe change. Flavorwire’s own verdict ran the other way: the novel has only grown more believable.

Marilyn Gardner of the Christian Science Monitor was largely favorable. Her February 24, 1986 review said the novel “chillingly projects a repressive new social order,” though she also asked whether Atwood’s indignation belonged to a cautious reformer or a resigned pessimist.

A third dispute concerns the label. Atwood reserves “science fiction” for things humans cannot yet do and calls her own books speculative fiction, built from means already at hand (Wikipedia). In a 2009 Guardian review of a later Atwood novel, The Year of the Flood, Ursula K. Le Guin judged that definition arbitrarily restrictive and read it as a way of keeping the work out of a genre many literary readers dismiss, as the Vector blog summarized the same day.

Reader complaints are smaller. The narrow viewpoint produces the claustrophobia the book is known for, and also a thin view of how the coup happened, which stays mostly in flashback. One reviewer at Jessica’s Reading Room wanted more action even while calling it an “engaging and scary read.”

Back corner of a plain wooden cupboard with tiny scratched words in the wood

Pages That Won’t Burn

The book has spent decades on challenged-book lists. The American Library Association ranked it seventh among the most challenged books of 2019, with challengers citing “vulgarity and sexual overtones,” according to CBC’s report on the list released April 20, 2020.

In 2022 Atwood and Penguin Random House answered book bans with an object. The Unburnable Book was a single copy of the novel with Handmaid artwork by Noma Bar, unveiled on May 23, 2022 at the PEN America Literary Gala in New York and sold to raise money for PEN America (Penguin Random House). According to GPB, its pages were heat-resistant aluminum, bound with nickel wire and aerospace-grade stainless steel and printed in ink that holds at 2,200°F. In a promotional video Atwood tried to burn it with a flamethrower and failed. She said she never expected to be “trying to burn one of my own books… and failing.” It sold at Sotheby’s on June 7, 2022 for $130,000, against an estimate of $100,000.

Atwood tied the project to Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (GPB), which has its own review on this blog.

The removals did not stop there. In late August 2025, Edmonton Public Schools pulled more than 200 library books to comply with a ministerial order signed that July by Alberta Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides, which bars books with explicit sexual content for students in all grades. The Handmaid’s Tale was on the list (Global News). Students in Grade 10 and up can still reach books the province deems to contain non-explicit sexual content, and Nicolaides described the aim as protecting young students. Atwood answered on August 31 with a satirical short story posted on social media (CFJC).

From Page to Screen

The first screen version came in 1990. Volker Schlöndorff directed, Harold Pinter wrote part of the screenplay, and Natasha Richardson, Robert Duvall and Faye Dunaway starred. It opened in West Germany on February 15 and in the United States on March 9, 1990, to lukewarm reviews and about $5 million at the box office (Wikipedia). It adds a murder the novel does not contain and closes with a voice-over placing the narrator safe among rebels, an answer the book withholds.

Other forms followed. Poul Ruders’s opera premiered at the Royal Danish Opera in Copenhagen on March 6, 2000. The Royal Winnipeg Ballet staged a version in October 2013, with choreography by Lila York and music by James MacMillan. Renée Nault’s graphic novel, more than 300 hand-painted pages, appeared on March 26, 2019 (The Canadian Encyclopedia).

Hulu’s series, created by Bruce Miller and starring Elisabeth Moss, premiered on April 26, 2017, with Atwood as a consulting producer. Its first season won eight Primetime Emmys from 13 nominations, including Outstanding Drama Series, the first time a streaming series took that award. The show ran six seasons and 66 episodes, and the last episode was released on May 27, 2025 (Wikipedia).

The first full trailer, released in March 2017 ahead of the premiere (see TechCrunch and Tubefilter):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJTonrzXTJs

The sequel novel, The Testaments (2019), shared the Booker Prize with Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other. The rules allowed a single winner, and the judges named two anyway (Booker Prizes). Bruce Miller adapted it for Hulu, where it premiered in April 2026 with Ann Dowd as Aunt Lydia, Chase Infiniti as Agnes and Lucy Halliday as Daisy (Variety Australia).

Red Robes in Public

The costume left the screen almost as soon as the series arrived. Women first wore it to the Texas senate in March 2017, at a March 20 debate on two abortion-related bills, after NARAL Pro-Choice Texas director Heather Busby took the idea from actors promoting the Hulu show at South by Southwest. Protests followed in Ohio, Albany and Washington that summer, according to NBC News. Busby had worried the outfit might read as a Red Riding Hood costume. People understood the reference.

Open book with metallic pages on a stone ledge at dusk with a small flame at its edge

Frequently Asked Questions

Is The Handmaid’s Tale a true story?
No. Gilead is invented, but Atwood says nothing in the book lacks a precedent in real life, from Iran to Romania to Puritan New England.

Is it science fiction?
Atwood calls it speculative fiction and keeps the other term for things people cannot yet do. Ursula K. Le Guin argued in 2009 that this definition is arbitrarily restrictive.

Why does the novel end with “Historical Notes”?
The final chapter is a lecture from 2195, after Gilead’s fall, about Offred’s tapes, found in Bangor, Maine. It offers a theory of what became of her and no answer.

Has the book been banned?
It has been challenged repeatedly. It ranked seventh on the American Library Association’s 2019 list of most challenged books, and Edmonton Public Schools pulled it from library shelves in 2025 under an Alberta order.

Is there a sequel?
Yes. The Testaments (2019) shared that year’s Booker Prize, and Hulu’s series adaptation of it premiered in April 2026.

How long did the Hulu series run?
Six seasons and 66 episodes, from the April 26, 2017 premiere to the final episode on May 27, 2025.

Where to Read It

The Handmaid’s Tale (affiliate link). The linked copy is the 2006 Everyman’s Library hardcover, the same edition as the buy button at the top of the page.

Further Reading

Two WordPress book blogs reviewed it with different temperatures. Jessica’s Reading Room gave it four stars in September 2021, found it unsettling and recommended it widely while wishing for more action. George L Thomas rated it 8 out of 10 in April 2023 and wrote, “If you have not read the book, I highly recommend you do.”

Two other books in the same tradition have reviews here: Animal Farm: A Political Allegory of Totalitarianism and The Power of Knowledge: A Review of “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury.

Sources

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