In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [37]
The Handmaid’s Tale was published in Canada in the fall of 1985, and in the United States and the United Kingdom in the spring of 1986. In the United Kingdom, its first reviewers treated it as a yarn rather than a warning: they’d already experienced Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan republic and seemed to have no fear of re-enacting that scenario. In Canada, people asked, in anxious Canadian fashion, “Could it happen here?” In the United States, Mary McCarthy, writing in the New York Times, gave the book a largely negative review on the grounds that it lacked imagination, and anyway it was unlikely ever to take place, not in the secular society she perceived as the American reality. But on the West Coast, so attuned to earthquake tremors, switchboards on talk shows lit up like Las Vegas, and someone graffitied on the Venice Beach seawall: “The Handmaid’s Tale Is Already Here!”
It wasn’t already here, not quite, not then. I thought for a while in the 1990s that maybe it never would be. But now I’m wondering again. Of recent years, American society has moved much closer to the conditions necessary for a takeover of its own power structures by an anti-democratic and repressive government. Approximately five years after The Handmaid’s Tale was published, the Soviet Union disintegrated, the West slapped itself on the back and went shopping, and pundits proclaimed the end of history. It looked as if, in the race between Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World—control by terror versus control through conditioning and consumption—the latter had won, and the world of The Handmaid’s Tale appeared to recede. But now we see a United States weakened by two draining wars and a financial meltdown, and America appears to be losing faith in the basic premises of liberal democracy. After 9/11, the Patriot Act passed with barely a cough, and in Britain citizens have accepted a degree of state supervision that would once have been unthinkable.
It’s a truism that enemy states tend to mirror one another in organization and methods. When colonies were the coming thing, everyone wanted one. Atom bombs in the United States created the desire for some in the U.S.S.R. The Soviet Union was a large bureaucratic centralized state, and so was the America of those times. What form will the United States assume now that it’s opposed by unrelenting religious fanaticisms? Will it soon produce rule by the same kind of religious fanaticism, only of a different sect? Will the more repressive elements within it triumph, returning it to its origins as a Puritan theocracy and giving us The Handmaid’s Tale in everything but the outfits?
I’ve said earlier that dystopia contains within itself a little utopia, and vice versa. What, then, is the little utopia concealed in the dystopic Handmaid’s Tale? There are two: one is in the past—the past that is our own present. The second is placed in a future beyond the main story by the Afterword at the end of the book, which describes a future in which Gilead—the tyrannical republic of The Handmaid’s Tale—has ended, and has thus become a subject for conferences and academic papers. I suppose that’s what happens to ustopian societies when they die: they don’t go to Heaven, they become thesis topics.
After The Handmaid’s Tale there was a period of approximately eighteen years during which I did not write ustopian novels, but then came Oryx and Crake in 2003. Oryx and Crake is dystopic in that almost the entire human race is annihilated, before which it has split into two parts: a technocracy and an anarchy. And, true