Margaret Atwood Reflects on Art and Reality Imitating Each Other

This article was originally published by AWFJ.org

Despite more than 50 books published in 40-plus languages, author Margaret Atwood may always be best known for her novel and hit series The Handmaid’s Tale, and now its sequel The Testaments. Both are set in a dystopian future society where women are forced to live under a fundamentalist theocratic dictatorship that denies them basic rights and freedoms.

“Everything in The Handmaid's Tale has happened somewhere, sometime,” Atwood affirmed at a public appearance on Wednesday. “Somebody wrote on Twitter (now X), ‘Where does Margaret Atwood come up with all this weird shit?’ And I was like, ‘It's the human race that came up with all this weird shit.’ And believe me, there's a lot weirder shit out there that the human race has done.’”

Atwood spoke Wednesday with Gloria Feldt, co-founder and president of Take the Lead Women and former president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, at Take the Lead’s annual Power Up Conference in Washington, DC timed with Women’s Equality Day.

“The TV folks used the same rule,” added Atwood, who served as co-executive and consulting producer on the multiple Emmy-winning show. “So, if they came up with some outlandish thing, they had to justify it.” This was intentional, to underscore the basis in reality of these dystopian scenarios.

Gilead and the USA

Atwood said inspiration for The Handmaid’s Tale, originally published in 1985, was rooted in American history and the Reagan years. A substrate of political persecution “has always been there in the United States. It's come up, it's come down, it's come up, it's come down. It started to come up again in the '80s, so that's when I started writing The Handmaid's Tale. If the United States were to have totalitarianism, was the theoretical question, what kind of totalitarianism would it have?”

She determined, based on history, that what would likely take hold in the US is a “religious styled totalitarianism.” So she invented Gilead, the religious-based totalitarian regime that prohibits women from reading, owning property or controlling their own reproduction. But, she noted, “the people in my book ruling Gilead are not Christians. They are people who have refashioned Christianity to suit themselves. Does that sound at all familiar?

The Election that Changed the Frame

When The Handmaid’s Tale book first came out, reactions differed around the world, said Atwood, who is originally from Canada. Some people in the US seemed to think the ideas were far-fetched, as if events like that “would never happen here,” she added. Then Trump was elected.

Atwood recalled how, at the Hollywood launch party for the series in 2017, her agent joked that she was “the only person who has benefitted from the election of Donald Trump.” That’s because, as luck and history—or, as she joked, “bad luck and history”—would have it, Trump’s election made some of the themes of her work feel suddenly more relevant.

“It could easily have gone the other way,” she said. “Had Hilary Clinton been elected, then Handmaid's Tale, although it would still be out there, would not have been out there in the same way... Because we were still filming in November, everybody in the show woke up the next morning, and they said, ‘We're in a different show.’”

“Nothing had changed. The scripts were all the same, but the frame had changed. The way in which people were going to view this had radically changed. Instead of, ‘Well, at least that didn't happen,’ people were going, ‘Here it comes, and here it comes.’ I don't think you're going to get the outfits, but some of the rest of it has already happened. And if you've read Project 2025, you will know that there are people in this country who think that women shouldn't vote.”

But, she added later, “History is not a line that goes only in one direction… Progress is not inevitable, and there isn't any one future. There are multiple possible futures, and we don't know which one we're going to get.” She said she tells her European friends not to count the Americans out just yet.

The Tale That Defined a Career

Nestled in an armchair, her small frame dressed in black with pops of bright pink poking out at the collar and wrists, Atwood had the mostly female audience at the DC conference laughing and clapping with her sharp comments and humorous asides.

Atwood, who turns 87 this fall, is still a vibrant stage presence and maintains a busy calendar of speaking engagements, lately talking about her 624-page autobiographical collection, Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, a New York Times bestseller published last year by Doubleday.

Asked why she doesn’t write more stories set in utopias, she joked that literary utopias are “boring.” But she also noted that it’s not so easy to create perfect worlds, especially if you want to base the scenarios in reality, as with The Handmaid’s Tale. “I think the mistake always is believing that you can make the world perfect. You cannot, unless you restructure human nature itself. You can make it better. You can make it fairer, but you cannot make it perfect.”

Images courtesy of Hulu