The Handmaid's Tale: Sociohistorical Context

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is, of course, part of the science-fiction genre. In spite of this, the novel draws much of its inspiration from real historical events and antiquated societal norms of different eras. The book was written in the mid-1980s, in both West Berlin and Alabama. So, the societal beliefs of the time and the history behind those specific locations should be reflected in the story.

First and foremost, the 1980s were a time in which feminist progress and preoccupations about the future coexisted. The previous decades had been a big help with the acquisition of women’s right to vote in 1920 and the Sex Revolution of the ’60s and ’70s. Yet, in the 1980s, there was a common fear that these advances in women's rights would be reversed and society would lose the progress it had made, particularly after the election of Ronald Reagan. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood clearly illustrates these concerns as women do not have the right to vote or possess control over their bodies. The fertile women left are sold for the purpose of reproduction in the novel’s dystopian vision of the future. Other preoccupations included the decline of birthrates and the danger of nuclear power. These issues were intertwined in the story. Women in Gilead experienced a surge in infertility because of a nuclear mistake, as described in the synopsis of the book on SparkNotes.

Second and last, having written the book in West Berlin and Alabama, the themes of slavery and of war most assuredly impacted Atwood’s writing. The histories of Berlin and Alabama are both marked by violence and oppression. A wall divided West Berlin from East Berlin in the 1980s. The wall resulted in many tensions between both sides and gave the people of Berlin the feeling of being entrapped, of being unable to get in or out of the city. The main character of the book also experiences this feeling. Societal enslavement is preventing her from being free, and she is someone else's possession rather than her own. That brings me to Alabama's history of slavery. Similarly, slaves in the United States had also been imposed a duty they had not asked for. They were also far from free and considered property of their masters. In both the book and American history, violence was used as punishment when the slaves or women acted on their own accord.

Overall, it is clear that sociohistorical factors influenced the outcome of the novel. Atwood incorporated into the book the mentalities and struggles of the 1980s as well as the historical events of the places she was in at the time of writing. These influences are what make this science fiction a little more plausible.

MEDIAGRAPHY

American Experience. “The Pill and the Sexual Revolution”. Women in American History, PBS.org, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/pill-and-sexual-revolution/.

KELLY, Kim. “A Forgotten War on Women”. The New Republic, 22^nd of May 2018, https://newrepublic.com/article/148493/forgotten-war-women.

MEARES, Hadley. “Why Royal Women Gave Birth in Front of Huge Crowds for Centuries”. History, 9^th of August 2019, https://www.history.com/news/royal-birth-traditions-marie-antoinette-meghan-markle.

REGALADO, Michelle. “9 Nightmarish Things in 'The Handmaid's Tale' Inspired by History.” Insider, Insider, 26th of August 2019, https://www.insider.com/handmaids-tale-based-on-real-world-origins-history-events-2019-8#:~:text=Atwood%20was%20inspired%20by%20biblical,%22promiscuous%22%20women%20around%20WWI.

SparkNotes. “The Handmaid’s Tale”. Sparknotes, Date of Publication Unknown, https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/handmaid/context/.