Margaret Atwood never meant for this to happen, but she doesn’t mind that The Handmaid’s Tale has become a symbol of political protest.
Abortion activists have donned the characters’ red dresses and white bonnets at every feminist gathering from the Women’s March to protests of anti-abortion legislation, and some readers take the dystopian story so seriously, in fact, that billionaire makeup mogul Kylie Jenner got harassed online for throwing a “tone deaf” Handmaid’s Tale-themed birthday party when “women’s rights and autonomy are particularly under attack.”
Atwood is well aware that her 1985 novel, now a popular TV show, means more to a lot of people than she ever intended it to. “I think using the handmaids’ costume as a protest mechanism is brilliant. You can’t be thrown out, you’re not making a disturbance, and you’re not saying anything, but you’re very visible and everybody knows what you mean. So it has been a brilliant tactic,” she told the New York Times. As for whether she’s had any influence in the rise of red-and-white clothed protesters across America, she admits, “I have no control over it.”
Atwood may think the use of her book to champion current feminist causes is “brilliant,” but she doesn’t quite see the parallels her readers have drawn from the book to 2019. In her writing, she’s not critiquing modern America, but much of human history:
Her bestselling novel is dystopian, but it is not, as many would argue, specifically prescient for our times. Neither, for that matter, is 1984.
Atwood has just finished a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, which comes out Sept. 10. The Testaments has already been named to the Booker Prize shortlist, and as much as readers may like it to a book about President Trump, it’s not.
When the New York Times’ Alexandra Alter asked if Atwood wrote the book to address the new parallels of “the erosion of reproductive rights,” etc., Atwood responded: “No, no. It’s always bubbling away in any country. White supremacists are there and then they come out when conditions are favorable, as they are in the United States right now.”
She’s not quite the feminist some would want her to be either. She won’t adopt the term without first clarifying, “So what kind am I? Because I’m interested in fairness, I’m of an egalitarian kind, in which equal means equal, it doesn’t mean superior. So you don’t get extra points.”
Readers will continue to draw their own conclusions about her work, perhaps without realizing that its totalitarian state, Gilead, critiques not mainstream Christianity, but religious fundamentalism. For her part, though, Atwood takes the proper role of an author: She’ll let readers draw their own conclusions. “I don’t want to be too specific,” she said, “because you’re just dictating to the reader, and I would rather let them do their own thinking.”
