THT Context

• At the time of writing, in the 1980s, religious right-wing fundamentalist groups were growing in influence in America - These groups were generally characterised by a strong backing for President Reagan and the Republican Party, who valued conservatism and “family values”
• “Family values” equated to traditional, heterosexual nuclear families
• Reagan appealed to white, working-class Americans who felt racist resentment against the advances black people had made during the civil rights movement
• Reagan also appealed to religious groups such as the Moral Majority, who pushed for a return to traditional ideas such as the role of women as housewives and no sex outside of marriage
• Today’s readers might receive the novel in the context of more recent President Trump’s authoritarian tendencies and his vice-president’s anti-abortion beliefs
• June 2022, the Supreme Court overturned the constitutionally protected right to access abortion in the US, leaving the question of how to regulate abortion to individual states
• At the time Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, the prognosis for AIDS was death within a year of diagnosis
• Public fears about AIDS fed into Christian right propaganda that opposed sex outside of marriage, and homosexuality - This propaganda likely inspired the political backdrop of Gilead
• Historical Notes - reader learns that the reduced fertility rate in Gilead was as a result of a sexually transmitted disease
• Waves of Western feminist movement

  • First Wave
  • Second Wave
  • Third Wave
  • Fourth Wave
• First Wave started

  Mid-19th to early 20th centuries
• First Wave

  Suffrage movement
• Second Wave occurred

  Mid-20th century
• Second Wave

  Advocacy for women’s rights in the workplace, in marriage and in society more generally
• Third Wave occurred

  1990s to 2010s
• Third Wave

  Abolition of gender stereotypes, expansion of discussion about violence against women, reclamation of derogatory terms and more emphasis on race, class and transgender rights
• Fourth Wave occurred

  2010s until present
• Fourth Wave

  Rejection of gender norms and binaries, utilisation of social media for activism and movements such as #MeToo
• Abortion legalised in US - 1973
• Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale during the 1980s, during Second Wave feminism
• In Gilead, those in charge want a return to the pre-Second Wave conditions of domesticity and strict gender roles - Atwood viewed this as a setback from the progress that feminists had made
• • Offred’s flashbacks and memories of her mother includes the rise of Second Wave feminism and the anti-feminist backlash of New Right Christian fundamentalism
• The voices of the women in the novel represent both traditional feminine and new feminist positions - Moira & Offer's mother
• Implied criticism of more radical feminism in the novel, which calls for a radical change to society where male supremacy is removed completely
• The reader can infer that Offred’s mother was a feminist activist, as she supported a protest which burnt pornographic books
• Two of the main women in Offred’s life are representations of active feminism, and yet Offred seems to observe their fight and politics from a distance - It is left to the reader to consider whether Offred could be considered a feminist via her subversive behaviour rather than active resistance
• Atwood grew up in Canada, spending much of her childhood in the countryside - This helped to foster an interest in the environment, and has often spoken about the ways in which climate change could make existing inequalities in society worse
• 1970s - harmful pesticides began to be banned by the US government, and there was an increase in awareness of the environmental problems caused by the use of pesticides and chemicals
• Offred mentions that grocery stores like “Loaves and Fishes” rarely open anymore because the seas are so polluted that there are no longer enough fish
• Atwood had an interest in 17th-century American Puritanism in New England - In particular, the Salem witch trials, in which her relative Mary Webster was hanged for being a witch, but survived
• The novel features hangings on the Wall for those whose crime is being “labelled”
• Many of the practices of Gilead are reminiscent of those of the Puritans, who lived in a rigid theocracy based on a few choice selections from the Bible
• Gilead’s attitudes towards women as an inferior sex are directly linked to a Puritan mindset
• New England Puritan women were often assigned names such as “Silence”, “Patience”, “Comfort” and “Fear”
• The use of Cambridge, Massachusetts as the inspiration for the setting of Gilead allowed Atwood to indirectly link fictional Gilead with the historical Puritan society created hundreds of years earlier
• The novel does not directly name a setting which broadens its appeal, suggesting that such authoritarianism could arise anywhere
• Televangelists were popular in the US during the 1970s and 1980s, and the gospel evangelist Tammy Faye Bakker is often cited as a possible model for Serena Joy
• Phyllis Schlafly - Serena Joy