Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

Karen Macfarlane (Mount Saint Vincent University)

Ed. by Wendy Roy, University of Saskatchewan
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.1.2: Canadian Writing and Culture (Anglophone): The Twentieth Century and beyond, 1900-present.
Vol. editors: Claire-Marie Brisson (Harvard University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Glen Nichols (Mount Allison University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Wendy Roy (University of Saskatchewan), Denis Salter (McGill University), Karis Shearer (University of British Columbia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1985

Places

Canada (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Gothic & Ghosts
Metafiction
Novel
Utopian / Dystopian

Resources

One of Margaret Atwood’s best known and most studied novels, The Handmaid's Tale is set in a dystopian near future, after the United States has been taken over by a group of fundamentalist Christian extremists. The government has been replaced by a theocracy and renamed “The Republic of Gilead” after “the mountain where Jacob promised to his father-in-law Laban that he would protect his two daughters” (Atwood, “Writing Utopia” rpt. Moving Targets Anansi Press 2004, 110). Atwood’s Gilead is a complex amalgam and distortion of late-twentieth century culture: the “moral majority” movement of the 1980s, declining birth rates, surrogate motherhood and other forms of reproductive technology and control, increasingly virulent strains of viruses and bacteria, the move from a cash-based to a “plastic” credit-card economy, the importance of television in the creation of culture and...

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3589 words

Citation: Macfarlane, Karen. "The Handmaid's Tale". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 01 December 2006 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=656, accessed 09 June 2026.]

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

Dates

Places

Genres and Modes

Resources

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