All Aunt Lydia's Children

Margaret Atwood writes a sequel to “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

- Jia Tolentino

The political deployment of imagery from Margaret Atwood’s novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” began in Texas, in the spring of 2017, at a protest against the state’s ongoing campaign to restrict abortion rights. The TV adaptation of the book would soon begin streaming, on Hulu. The show stars Elisabeth Moss as the novel’s narrator and protagonist, Offred, a woman stripped of her job, her family, and her name in a near­future American theocracy called Gilead. Offred is a Handmaid, forced to live as a breeding concubine; each month, she is ceremonially raped by her Commander, a man of high status, in the interest of rebuilding a population that has dwindled owing to secular immorality, environmental toxicity, and super­S.T.D.s. Like all Handmaids, she wears a scarlet dress, a long cloak, and a face­obscuring white bonnet, a uniform that Atwood based, in part, on the woman on the label of Old Dutch Cleanser, an image that had scared her as a child.

Women wore this uniform to the protest in Texas, and they have since worn it to protests in England, Ireland, Argentina, Croatia, and elsewhere. When “The Handmaid’s Tale” was published, in 1985, some reviewers found Atwood’s dystopia to be poetically rich but implausible. Three decades later, the book is most often described with reference to its timeliness. The current President has bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy,” and the Vice­President is a man who, as governor of Indiana, signed a law that required fetal remains of miscarriages and abortions, at any stage of pregnancy, to be cremated or buried. This year, half a dozen states have passed legislation banning abortion after around six weeks; Alabama passed a law that would ban abortion in nearly all circumstances, including cases involving rape or incest. (All these laws have yet to take effect.)