Back to Margaret Atwood’s Gilead

“Who would have thought that Gilead Studies—neglected for so many decades—would suddenly have gained so greatly in popularity?” So marvels a fictional historian in the postscript to The Testaments, the sequel to Mar­garet Atwood’s 1985 classic The Hand­maid’s Tale, about a totalitarian theocracy named Gilead in which fertile women are forced into childbearing.

The historian is speaking to a gathering of academics in the distant year of 2197, but one imagines Atwood might have muttered similar words to herself in 2017. The Trump administration was busy making social progressives ex­tremely nervous as it set out to dismantle Obama-era policies. Meanwhile, Hulu was resurrecting Atwood’s misogynistic theocracy on the small screen, taking viewers on a harrowing pilgrimage through their political nightmares.

In a review of the television series for the Christian Century, Kathryn Reklis warned that “finding too close a comparison between our current political situation and the dystopian fantasy is a genre mistake.” Still, it is unsurprising that Gilead re-entered the zeitgeist with an especially anxious vengeance. Protesters at the first Women’s March chanted “Make Mar­garet Atwood fiction again,” the Hand­maids’ iconic red cape and white cap became a common sight at political rallies, and any number of Internet startups began selling t-shirts emblazoned with “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum,” the mock Latin phrase (“Don’t let the bastards get you down”) that gives the heroine hope on her hardest days of state-mandated rape.