Written by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian novel. It presents a virtual republic called Gilead, which is built and completed by Christian fundamentals. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Gilead is a dystopian space where people are imprisoned and oppressed in the name of religion. Here, women’s bodies are strictly governed and regulated by the state. The author provides anti-utopian situations to an extreme against humanism and sexism, which in the end helped me to re-think about inequalities between the sexes in my own culture. The work’s feminist concerns make it a great piece to empower the public to gain knowledge about the political issues. The time when this novel was published, the feminism was not popular as much as today. In the 1980s, a term ‘feminist’ was even synonymous with ‘man-hater’ (Garcia, 04). Knowing this, we cannot come to a conclusion that The Handmaid’s Tale made feminism popular, but still remarkably brought the topic of inequality in feminism to the public.  This exposure of feminist consciousness became more popular together with the book’s growth in recognition.

In the article “Popular culture and Reproductive Politics”, Latimer claims that the novel’s use of satire allows for an examination of reproductive politics, which later works as a symptomatic of how the anti-abortion politics have become (Latimer, 213). The Handmaid’s Tale encourages readers to understand what it really means to be a woman or a man, and to challenge the already-existing cultural norms and embodied ideas. With the rise of public’s consciousness on reproductive politics through this novel, a film like Juno was able to offer similar issues in a more comfortable manner. In the end, it is within bounds to say that The Handmaid’s Tale brought it up to a point to the ‘success of the anti-abortion movement’, as the public no longer understands feminism as a simple backlash.

References

Jennifer R., Garcia. “Popularizing feminist politics: Margaret Atwood’s “the handmaid’s tale”, feminism, and popular culture.” ( 2003) ETD Collection for University of Texas, El Paso. 

Latimer, Heather. “Popular culture and Reproductive Politics: Juno, Knocked Up and the Enduring Legacy of The Handmaid’s Tale.” Feminist Theory 10 (2009): 211-226.