The Visceral, Woman-Centric Horror of <i>The Handmaid's Tale</i>

Call it luck, call it fate, call it the world’s most ridiculous viral marketing campaign, but the first television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale is debuting on Wednesday to audiences who are hyper-ready for it. The 1985 speculative fiction work by Margaret Atwood has featured on library waitlists and Amazon’s top 20 for months now—partly in anticipation of the new Hulu show, and partly in response to the strange new landscape that emerged after November 9, wherein women in the millions felt compelled to take to the streets to assert their attachment to reproductive freedom. (When the release date for The Handmaid’s Tale was announced in December, people joked that it would likely be a documentary by the time it arrived on TV screens.)

The cult status of the novel—which imagines an America in which Christian fundamentalists have staged a coup in the wake of a plummeting birthrate, forcing fertile women to bear children for powerful men and their wives—can be felt in how it’s transcended the realm of fiction to become a kind of cultural shorthand for female oppression. At the Women’s March on Washington in January, a number of signs read “Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again.” In March, women in Texas dressed up as handmaids to protest bills undermining abortion rights in the state.

But though the book is often interpreted as a dystopian warning from the future, it’s rooted in historical realism. When Atwood was writing it in Berlin in 1984, she determined that she would put nothing into it that hadn’t already happened to women somewhere on earth. “ is not a fantasy,” she told me. “It is a reality-based book. I call it DJ-ing reality, condensing reality into a mashup.” The novel has its origins in the 17th-century Puritans who settled in America, and in contemporary Afghanistan, and in Romania’s Decree