True Believers

The world of The Handmaid’s Tale feels chillingly close to our own.

- Diana Wichtel

An eye for an eye, a bonnet upon a bonnet and a definition of God’s mercy that includes an offending hand clamped in a vice over a gas flame … The Handmaid’s Tale is back for a second zeitgeistdissecting season.

I may be watching it from behind a sofa cushion as, among many lethal shortcomings of our species, a tendency for moral righteousness to result in mutilated bodies is pitilessly delineated.

This series heads off-piste into territory beyond Margaret Atwood’s dystopian 1985 novel about the newly minted theocracy, the Republic of Gilead, where a class of red-gowned sex slaves are forced to bear children for the infertile elite. “Blessed be the fruit,” they must chant dutifully. “Under His eye.”

Offred has lost her real name, June, to extreme fundamentalists, her daughter to some privileged, barren “mistress” and her husband to exile in Canada. She’s pregnant and on the run, determined to get out, if that’s even possible any more. “There probably is no out,” she says.