From Text to Screen: Erasing Racialized Difference in The Handmaid’s Tale

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, first published in 1985, is a dystopian novel about Gilead, a society in which a patriarchal elite has devised a brutal response to mass infertility. In the world skilfully created by Atwood, fertile white women, who have contravened the new gender and social laws, are enslaved for insemination by patriarchs in a tortuous rape ritual known as “The Ceremony.” I loved the book, and the award-winning 2017 serialization created by Bruce Miller, which captured the popular imagination with its chilling depiction of a dystopian near-future world. While the novel has been celebrated for its critique of brutal, patriarchal oppression, the treatment of racialization in both the text and series has attracted some criticism. Atwood’s novel has been criticized for not engaging with the issue of racism in the world she creates (Abraham, 2017; Berlatsky, 2017). Rather than explore the experiences of people of color in her novel, Atwood develops a world where people of color (“Children of Ham”) are sent into “closed ‘homelands’” (Atwood & Díaz, 2017). Her white protagonist, Offred, gives little thought to the implications of this as she negotiates the violent, patriarchal world that has evolved around her. Furthermore, Atwood draws on the treatment of transatlantic slaves in her novel, with descriptions of enslaved women and lynching and references to the “Underground Femaleroad” (Atwood, 1987, p. 258), in order to bring realism to her portrayal and elicit her readers’ sympathy for the suffering of her white protagonists (Abraham, 2017; Berlatsky, 2017). The suffering of the black people in her world is, however, rendered invisible.