Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

Karen Macfarlane (Mount Saint Vincent University)
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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 The government has been replaced by a theocracy and renamed “The Republic of Gilead” after “the mountain where Jacob promised to his father-in-law Laban that he would protect his two daughters”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…

3901 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 19 March 2024.]

656 The Handmaid's Tale 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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