Literary Speculation: The Handmaid's Tale

Upon first reading the theme of this week I wasn’t even sure how to distinguish between genre and literary fiction. So I googled it and read a Huffington post article, loosely defining genre fiction’s purpose as entertainment and escapism and literary fiction’s purpose as speculation and reflection into reality. In my opinion, the line between the two can be blurred, although there would be prime examples for both ends of the spectrum. Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” in my opinion would be a good example of literary fiction. While you do tend to get lost in the dystopian setup of post-American Gilead, it is a clear reflection of feminist concerns against a rebirth in conservative American values in the 80s. The Handmaid’s Tale is not a novel you want to get lost in, it’s a novel you read for insight into the consequences of power in the hands of sexist, “traditionalist” thinkers in which you can compare and contrast our modern world with the fictional one Atwood presents.

Gilead is America re-arranged by religious extremists due to rising infertility rates. The protagonist, given the name Offred as property “of Fred,” is a handmaid: a fertile woman forced into a life where her sole purpose is to bear children for a wealthy married couple in which the wife in infertile. It is speculated that the husband is also infertile, but the sexist society puts all of the blame on the woman, of course. The novel obviously also examines female desire and sexuality, microscoping in on the imbalance between the public need to see women as chaste and pure but the private need to see women as overly sexual creatures.

I have also seen most of the Hulu series based on this novel, and one of the things I liked better about the film series rather than the book was the inclusion of Ofglen’s homosexuality. In the book she never mentions being gay or having a wife, although she could have been without revealing that to Offred, but the show adds that to her character and I think it adds to the modern reflection, as gay rights are a very prominent and important current topic of discussion. I also found it interesting that in the novel, racism is in effect, Gilead has expelled people of color. In the show, however, people of color are included in the society as far as we’ve seen, although the Commanders all seem to be white. Although I understand the importance of roles for people of color in modern film, I find it odd that racism would not be a factor in this horribly discriminate dystopia.