Margaret Atwood was born in
Ottawa, Ontario, on November 18, 1939.
She published her first book of poetry in 1961 while
attending the University of Toronto. She later received degrees
from both Radcliffe College and Harvard University, and pursued
a career in teaching at the university level. Her first novel, The
Edible Woman, was published in 1969 to
wide acclaim. Atwood continued teaching as her literary career blossomed.
She has lectured widely and has served as a writer-in--residence
at colleges ranging from the University of Toronto to Macquarie
University in Australia.
Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale in
West Berlin and Alabama in the mid-1980s.
The novel, published in 1986, quickly became
a best-seller. The Handmaid’s Tale falls squarely
within the twentieth-century tradition of anti-utopian, or “dystopian”
novels, exemplified by classics like Aldous Huxley’s Brave
New World and George Orwell’s 1984. Novels
in this genre present imagined worlds and societies that are not
ideals, but instead are terrifying or restrictive. Atwood’s novel
offers a strongly feminist vision of dystopia. She wrote it shortly
after the elections of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret
Thatcher in Great Britain, during a period of conservative revival
in the West partly fueled by a strong, well-organized movement of
religious conservatives who criticized what they perceived as the
excesses of the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s.
The growing power of this “religious right” heightened feminist
fears that the gains women had made in previous decades would be
reversed.
In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood explores
the consequences of a reversal of women’s rights. In the novel’s
nightmare world of Gilead, a group of conservative religious extremists
has taken power and turned the sexual revolution on its head. Feminists argued
for liberation from traditional gender roles, but Gilead is a society
founded on a “return to traditional values” and gender roles, and
on the subjugation of women by men. What feminists considered the
great triumphs of the 1970s—namely, widespread access
to contraception, the legalization of abortion, and the increasing
political influence of female voters—have all been undone. Women
in Gilead are not only forbidden to vote, they are forbidden to
read or write. Atwood’s novel also paints a picture of a world undone
by pollution and infertility, reflecting 1980s
fears about declining birthrates, the dangers of nuclear power,
and -environmental degradation.
Some of the novel’s concerns seem dated today, and its
implicit condemnation of the political goals of America’s religious
conservatives has been criticized as unfair and overly paranoid.
Nonetheless, The Handmaid’s Tale remains one of
the most powerful recent portrayals of a totalitarian society, and
one of the few dystopian novels to examine in detail the intersection
of politics and sexuality. The novel’s exploration of the controversial
politics of reproduction seems likely to guarantee Atwood’s novel
a readership well into the twenty-first century.
Atwood lives in Toronto with novelist Graeme Gibson and
their daughter, Jess. Her most recent novel, The Blind Assassin, won Great
Britain’s Booker Prize for literature in 2000.
