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40 Years of The Handmaid’s Tale
Revisiting a classic of dystopian literature
The year was 1985. Gas was $1.09 a gallon. A new house averaged $89,000, a new car cost $9,000, and a stamp was 22 cents. President Ronald Reagan began his second term, while the Soviet Union got a new leader: Mikhail Gorbachev. The wreck of the Titanic was discovered. Back to the Future made its debut, as did Calvin and Hobbes, WrestleMania, and the Nintendo NES. Coca-Cola changed its 99-year-old formula and launched New Coke, which it scrapped 3 months later.
Many other things happened, but I’ll mention one more: Margaret Atwood, a Canadian writer, released The Handmaid’s Tale. This novel of an alternate America in which a repressive right-wing regime overthrows the government to establish a new nation, Gilead, won the 1985 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the 1987 Arthur C. Clarke Award, and it was nominated for the Booker Prize. It was adapted into a 1990 movie, a 2000 opera, and, in 2017, a Hulu TV series starring Elisabeth Moss, which has won numerous awards, including 15 Emmys.
The sixth and final season of the Hulu series is out now, making this the perfect opportunity to look back at the novel, which has often been banned or challenged due to its “profanity” and its “vulgarity and sexual overtones,” according to the ALA Office for…
