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The TV updating of the Margaret Atwood novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, reveals much about liberal fears and self righteousness, says Eric Ortlund

The only other option is to be sent into the environmental wasteland that is all that exists outside of Gilead. Offred (‘of Fred’, her owner, and also ‘offered’) has the misfortune of being assigned as a handmaid, and spends her days trying not to get noticed, fighting off boredom and attacks from the jealous wife of the house she has been assigned to, doing her sad duty as a concubine (‘one detaches oneself’ and describes it neutrally, she says), and relating to the reader the fractured memories of her former life, when she had her own name and a husband and son.

I find The Handmaid’s Tale both compulsive reading and morally convincing. Some feminist arguments are (to me, anyway) almost unbearable, just because women have been treated so badly in patriarchal societies in the past – and still are today, around the world. One wants to throw up one’s hands and say, ‘Stop preaching at me!’ But Atwood deftly avoids any such sanctimonious effect simply by narrating this not-implausible new world all from Offred’s perspective, making us utterly sympathetic to her and her suffering.

Offred wants to talk to the other handmaid she goes to town to buy groceries with, but doesn’t dare, since they might report each other. She’s shocked at the sensuality of female tourists who wear skirts which reveal their calves. She hides a pad of butter in her room to use as a lotion for her face. This little luxury means a great deal: since all that matters is reproduction, cosmetics aren’t allowed, but Offred wants some way to care for herself outside of her job as a concubine.

Atwood’s prose is as unadorned as the stripped world Offred lives in, but all the more powerful as Offred reveals to the reader the humanity struggling to find expression in a world when none is allowed and the threat of punishment is omnipresent.

The TV version

These seem to be the only two options in this new version of The Handmaid’s Tale: oppressive, totalitarian patriarchy, or the freedom of progressive liberalism, a freedom the handmaids remember with longing”

The televised version of The Handmaid’s Tale has definitely resonated with viewers, to the point that some women have begun wearing the costume of the handmaids – a red robe with a white wimple – at women’s right’s marches. For its part, the show stays mostly close to the source material, especially in the sense-smothering oppression which pervades the handmaids’ lives. Elisabeth Moss, the actress portraying Offred, is especially convincing as she hints at the emotions Offred experiences but cannot reveal. Two small but noticeable changes, however, give the show a significantly different ‘charge’ from the novel.

The first is the role of religion. In Atwood’s novel, Gilead is not truly a theocracy: the official ideology of the state is not specifically theological. If anything, the reason behind having handmaids is practical: as the environment has worsened, fertility has dropped precipitously and babies are needed just to keep society going. Religion does play a role in how this future state coheres. The house Offred is assigned to gathers for Bible reading and prayer every night. Strikingly, however, the Bible is kept locked up, and only certain passages from Genesis having to do with fertility are repeated. In the novel, Offred understands that reading the whole Bible could be very disruptive for the totalitarian government which has enslaved her! In one especially moving scene, when Offred is forced to pray, she silently tells God, ‘I don’t believe for an instant that what’s going on out there is what You meant.’

A number of these details are preserved in the show, but overall, the use of religion to subjugate women is more pronounced. During her indoctrination, she’s told God caused rising infertility rates as punishment for immorality. When one girl argues, her right eye is removed, and a religious justification given: ‘If your right eye offends you...’ During one especially ugly scene when Offred is doing her duty as a handmaid, ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ plays in the background. In other words, the televised version of Gilead is more obviously a theocracy than the novel’s.

The horrifying treatment of gay characters in the televised version of the story is also emphasized more strongly than in the book. In Atwood’s novel, homosexuals are executed; in the show, we are shown an actual trial, in which the Old Testament is cited as evidence and sentencing, and the camera follows the convicts to a scaffold where one character is hung. The teacher who indoctrinates women to be handmaids explicitly contrasts this new morality with the immorality of modern Western society before the fall of the US government.

Progress reversed

These changes are small but significant, especially in light of the massive changes in modern Western society in the last 10 years. The show explicitly presents the Republic of Gilead as a reaction against our current progressive democracy and seems, in effect, to be asking, What if all the changes in society of the last few years were undone? What if all the ‘progress’ we’ve seen was reversed? These seem to be the only two options in this new version of The Handmaid’s Tale: oppressive, totalitarian patriarchy, or the freedom of progressive liberalism, a freedom the handmaids remember with longing. And this is probably why I find the show so unconvincing. After all, is there anything modern Westerners have less to fear than theocratic patriarchy?

Atwood herself understands this point well. In a recent interview on the Sojourners website, she clarifies that she meant to portray a bastardized form of Christianity being used to solidify a totalitarian state, but that only such a twisted form would serve this purpose.”

Furthermore, the show seems blind to how progressive liberalism has shown itself deeply intolerant of outsiders, just as it has made great gains in recent years (most of the recent attacks on free speech come from the left). On the other side of the equation, Christianity can act as a powerful force against the oppression of women: one thinks of Josephine Butler, a Victorian Christian social reformer who worked tirelessly for women’s suffrage and property rights. Atwood herself understands this point well. In a recent interview on the Sojourners website, she clarifies that she meant to portray a bastardized form of Christianity being used to solidify a totalitarian state, but that only such a twisted form would serve this purpose. She goes on to state that you ‘can find the same in any power situation, such as politics or ideologies that purport to be atheist.’ The show seems less convinced on this point, and less convincing as a result. The makers of the show cite Trump’s election as evidence of its relevance, but Trump’s agenda is very far from the future portrayed in the show. Screwtape’s advice to Wormwood in Letter 25 of The Screwtape Letters, written several decades before Atwood’s novel, takes on prophetic clarity at this point:

We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger... The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under. Thus we make it fashionable to expose the dangers of enthusiasm at the very moment when they are all really becoming worldly and lukewarm; a century later, when we are really making them all Byronic and drunk with emotion, the fashionable outcry is directed against the dangers of the mere ‘understanding’. Cruel ages are put on their guard against sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against respectability, lecherous ones against Puritanism; and whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make liberalism the prime bogey.

Atwood’s novel won me over with its deceptively powerful prose and unflinching attention to its central character. The morally simplistic universe of the television show and its self-congratulatory tone may help, very ironically, to reinforce a different version of the oppressive and stifling society it fears.