During our first discussion about “The Handmaids Tale” (THT) by Margaret Atwood, we talked about the genre and what we should expect to see with this sort of book. The genre is dystopian speculative fiction. Speculative fiction is an umbrella genre that deals with elements that are not of real-life with more imaginative themes, this encompasses science fiction as well. Science fiction mainly deals with fiction content with a basis in science. The scientific theories, elements and facts are what distinguishes sci-fi from fantasy. This book is classified as a dystopian fiction which takes place in a dystopian setting. Dystopia, according to Dictionary.com, is “an imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic.” When relating this to a dystopian fiction piece this would mean that this genre deals with social and political problems in an unideal world. This book can also be classed as a political fable meaning it is a story conveying a moral, in this case focusing on the political side. This means “The Handmaids Tale” will take place in a dystopian world, involving real-life elements while dealing with social and political issues that we could face in this situation.
Based off of a passage from Margaret Atwood’s Essay on her book, The Handmaids Tale, we can gain more information on the setting of the story and the issues that may be faced during the book. From this passage, we can glean that the elite people from the United States have used Bible-based religion in order to take control and oppression the majority of the population. We can see that the issues the book with deal with are oppression by the right-wing fundamentalists and infertility, maybe religion as well. Though this book was written in the 1980s and is a social critique during this time, these issues are not resolved and we still face these problems nowadays.
During Margaret Atwood’s research for this issue, she varied between historical and humanitarian concepts. With pamphlets from Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, Amnesty International reports of atrocities in Latin America, Iran and Philippines; newspaper cuttings from surrogate mothers, institutional control of human reproduction from Nazi Germany to Ceausescu’s Romania, new reproductive technologies as threats to women. These topics from discussing AIDS and sexually transmitted to disease, human rights during detention, birth rates and control, fertility, new methods of fertilisation (IVF). Her research also deals with Nazi Germany and their view on Eugenics, basically meaning that they believed that the human species needed to be perfected. These topics deal with the issues the book is based around. These being, in a general sense, fertility and political issues.
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