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The Handmaid's Tale: the true stories that inspired Margaret Atwood's dystopian drama

Posted by: Kayleigh Dray
Published: 5 months ago

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Did you think Channel 4's The Handmaid's Tale was fictional? Think again.

The Handmaid's Tale first roared onto UK television screens in May 2017 to critical acclaim. And, as promised, the star-studded dystopian drama has proven to be incredibly vocal about the current political climate and what it means for individuals, especially women; no wonder, then, that we're all counting down the days until season four drops later this month.

Based on Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel of the same name, the show (in which Elisabeth Moss plays titular 'Handmaid,' June Osborne) takes place in Gilead, a near-future version of North America in which the Constitution has been overthrown. As a result of this, women's rights and identities have been stripped away, with fertile women being rounded up, red tagged, and forced into a life of sexual servitude and surrogacy.

Tragically, the concept of female genital mutilation is not confined to the pages of Atwood's book: 140 million women and young girls all over the world are believed to have undergone the procedure, which sees their outer labia, inner labia, and clitoris removed, often without anaesthesia or pain relief.

And it is estimated that some 23,000 girls living in the UK are at risk of FGM, too, despite the fact that the act was criminalised in the UK in 1985.

Nimco Ali, co-founder of Daughters of Eve, a non-profit organisation that aims to empower and protect people from FGM-affected communities, tells Stylist: "They say it makes you a woman; it's a rite of passage. But as you start to grow up and learn about feminism, you start to realise this is about control and fear.

"I look at my three-year-old niece and she's free and fearless. That is what FGM is there to stop. Break the girl and then mould her into an image of what men want."

Elisabeth Moss as Offred in The Handmaid's Tale.

Attitudes to rape

In The Handmaid's Tale, June tells us about the deliberate humiliation at the Red Centre of Janine, whose dreadful experience of gang-rape was made to seem her own fault by Aunt Lydia, telling the others that Janine must have "led them on".

"But whose fault was it?" she asks them.

"Her fault," they chant in unison, pointing their fingers at the frightened woman.

Such attitudes are not, however, confined to Gilead. At the time of this article's publication, the UK criminal justice system does not adequately support or protect female survivors of male violence; indeed, just one in 70 reports of rape in England and Wales currently results in a charge, let alone a conviction.

17th century American-Puritan theocracy

In Gilead, the government rules in the name of God (or a god), which is why they continuously reference the fact that they are "under His eye".

Nowadays, of course, the United States of America is founded on the idea of democracy – with the public electing officials to make laws and government decisions on their behalf, and according to the rules of the Constitution. But this was not always the case.

As Atwood explained to The Guardian in 2016: "America was not initially founded as an 18th-century enlightenment republic. It was initially a 17th-century theocracy.

"That tendency keeps bubbling up in America from time to time."

A ceremony in The Handmaid's Tale.

Phyllis Schlafly

Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski) is a major character in The Handmaid's Tale – and, as those who have read the book will know, she played a major role in the shaping of Gilead's regime.

That's right: before the Republic was formed, Serena made headlines with her powerful lectures and essays on the subject of "a women's place". She repeatedly argued that traditional gender roles should be upheld at all costs, that women should remain in the home, and that 'wicked' and 'immoral' females be punished for their 'sins'. And, as we all know, her dreams of a misogynist future have come true – although she, like so many others of her gender, has been forced to pay for it with her freedom.

Yvonne Strahovski as Serena Joy in The Handmaid's Tale.

While Serena is undeniably fictional, it is fair to speculate that she was inspired by the real-life Phyllis Schlafly, who was a similarly paradoxically public advocate for domestic women. She began her political career as an anti-feminist in 1964 when she published her first pro-family book, and led the charge against the Equal Rights Amendment, insisting that women should stop focusing on politics and instead tend to their families and work inside the home.

It wasn't long, however, before Schlafly's words came back to bite her in the ass.

In 1967, she ran for president of the National Federation of Republican Women. However, her critics argued that, as a mother of six children, she couldn't fully devote herself to a political post – and, after an ugly fight, Schlafly lost.

The yellow bands of Nazi Germany

As demonstrated in The Handmaid's Tale, the women of Gilead are forced to wear outfits which identify their roles and rights (or lack thereof) in society. The Marthas (household domestics) don identical green ensembles, the wives of the Commanders always wear blue. Handmaids, meanwhile, wear heavy red dresses and white wings on the sides of their heads.

Atwood has told Penguin that many of the horrors witnessed inThe Handmaid's Tale are inspired by the history of Nazi Germanys, and the parallels are all too clear here; just as the Handmaids are identified by the colour of their habits, the Jews were forced to wear a yellow band around their arm, which sported a star of David. This was used to separate the Jewish from those who were not Jewish. It also served as a reminder to the Jews that they had no rights under German law.

The women of The Handmaid's Tale are not allowed to own property, run businesses, or hold jobs. It is a law which is implemented without warning: soldiers march into offices all over the country, the women are ordered to leave, and their bank accounts are frozen. It quickly becomes apparent that this isn't just an act of discrimination: it's a form of control, and it renders the women vulnerable to the new regime.

Again, this is very similar to how the Jews were treated in Nazi Germany (a comparison which is frequently made by Offred in the original novel The Handmaid's Tale). On the night of 9 November 1938 (Kristalnacht), over 250 synagogues were burned, 7,000 Jewish businesses were trashed and looted, Jewish cemeteries, hospitals, schools, and homes were looted, and dozens of Jewish people were killed – all while police and fire brigades stood by.

The morning after this 'Night of Broken Glass', Jewish people found that they were no longer considered autonomous human beings – let alone citizens of Germany. Curfews were instated, limiting the hours in which they could leave their homes. They were barred from entering public spaces, expelled from schools, and almost entirely segregated from society. And, in less than 24 hours, some 30,000 German Jews had been arrested for the "crime" of being Jewish and sent to the concentration camps, where millions of them perished.

The assassination of Ernst vom Rath

Gilead's laws are undeniably extreme – so how did they come to pass? Well, there was a terrorist attack, Congress was slaughtered, and in the interest of protecting the people, the Constitution was suspended. As each of these events happened, "we didn't wake up," says Offred, and women's rights were eroded before their very eyes.

Again, it calls to mind the events leading up to the Holocaust: on 7 November 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Polish Jew living in Paris, shot Ernst vom Rath, a diplomat attached to the German embassy in Paris.

Ignoring the fact that Grynzpan acted out of desperation for his parents (still trapped in the No Man's Land between Poland and Germany), the Nazis used the shooting to fan anti-semitic fervour. They claimed that Grynszpan did not act alone, but was part of a wider Jewish conspiracy against Germany – and, two days later, they ordered SA officers to attack the Jews.

The Holocaust

There are so many parallels that can be drawn between The Handmaid's Tale and the Holocaust. Large groups of people are sent to work in concentration camps where they will almost certainly die, for example, and neighbours are encouraged to inform upon their friends. Just as the Jews were reduced to numbers, handmaids lose their names and are known only as the property of their Commanders. Literacy is forbidden, property rights are terminated, and soldiers uphold totalitarian laws. And, of course, the Commanders of the Faithful order the executions of LGBTQ people, intellectuals, and others deemed 'subversive'.

On a more subtle level, The Handmaid's Tale also sees women rounded up and subjected to invasive tests and scans to determine whether or not they are fertile – much as the Jews were sorted into two groups: those who could work and those who could not. Those who could were sent to work in the ghettos. Those who could not were sent to their deaths in the concentration camps. And, again, this is similar to the women of Gilead: if they are fertile, then they are given the duty of producing a healthy baby for the state. If they are not, then they are declared an "un-woman" and sent to the colonies, where they, too, will be worked to death.

A Scene from The Handmaid's Tale.

The Salem witch trials

Atwood has made no secret of the fact that the events of The Handmaid's Tale are, in part, inspired by the 17^th century Salem witch trials, in which women were systematically demonised, informed on, and violently punished for being 'different' to puritanical norms.

Speaking to Bill Moyers in 2017, the author said: "The Salem witchcraft trial is in my opinion one of the foundation events of American history. And it was an event where you can call it a clash between mythology and politics if you like. Because it depended very much on a belief in the invisible world. Cotton Mather, who was a very prominent divine at the time, wrote a book calledThe Wonders of the Invisible World, which was all about the behaviour of witches. And the devil. And this is what people believed.

"They weren't being hypocrites when they did these things. They were actually scared of witchcraft and the devil. And they believed that the devil could work his way into their community through witches, so it was serious business. But it was also a hysteria."

Insisting that Americans under Trump's rule were behaving in much the same way, Atwood added: "The surprise to me has been all of the stuff I learned long ago. I thought, 'Nobody's going to be interested in this again. You know what good is knowing 17^thcentury theology ever going to be to me? Or anybody else. Surely nobody's interested.' And now suddenly it's all come back. Because things do go around in cycles."

Everything that happens in The Handmaid's Tale has happened IRL, says Margaret Atwood.

The Romanian ban on birth control

In The Handmaid's Tale, we quickly learn that fertility rates have plummeted – and, in an act of desperation, the government has rendered abortion and birth control illegal. Every fertile woman has a duty to bear children, and those who don't… well, they're either sent to work (and die) in the Colonies, or they're hanged as an example to all other handmaids.

The idea of a birth control ban may be frightening, but it is not a new one: in 1966, President Ceausescu, in a desperate attempt to increase the population of Romania, banned birth control and abortion, and ordered Romanian women of child-bearing age to have five children each.

To enforce Decree 770, secret police were instated at hospitals, women were subjected to monthly tests by gynaecologists, sex education in schools was refocused on the benefits of motherhood, and people were taxed for being childless. Women, of course, found themselves heavily criminalised if they did not comply with Ceausescu's reproductive policies.

In some ways, the abortion and birth control ban worked: the Romanian population steadily increased, and the glorification of childbirth led to a huge baby boom – but the consequences were tragic and long-reaching. Childbirth mortality rate became the highest of Europe, and more than 9,000 women died as a result of complications arising from illegal terminations. Countless others were left permanently maimed.

Those who did have children found themselves unable to afford their upkeep. As a result, around 100,000 unwanted babies were abandoned to dire conditions in communist orphanages: those who lived until the age of 12 (and not many did) were reclaimed by their parents and put to work.

Decree 770 was reversed in 1990, after the Romanian Revolution, and, since that time, abortion has been legal on request in Romania.

Elisabeth Moss as Offred/June in The Handmaid's Tale.

The Women's March

In the third episode of the first season ofThe Handmaid's Tale, we watch as June (Moss) and Moira (Samira Wiley) grab hold of placards, take to the streets, and march for their rights.

While the original novel was penned as a response to Ronald Reagan, one can't help but think of the Women's March in January 2017, which saw millions of women all around the world rise up together to defend women's rights and the sisterhood.

Armed with signs protesting President Trump, mocking both Trump's past treatment of women and controversial statements he made on the campaign trail, it was a spectacular show of force on the first full day of his presidency: the Washington rally alone attracted over 500,000 people according to city officials, making it easily one of the biggest demonstrations in the city's history.