Today we did some research into the background of the novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood. By researching about the events taking place during this time period, mostly focused on the 1980s with some previous to that, we were able to give ourselves some context, which will help us to better understand the novel when we start reading it because we will easily be able to make connections to the events we looked into.
During this time period many events were taking place such as the development of In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF), which is a process that the egg and the sperm are combined outside the body, meaning people who have trouble having children naturally can have this procedure done instead. This is especially important to note because there was also an infertility scare blamed on women due to their “liberalised sexual activities”. One thing I found out as well was that the name of the book was loosely inspired by the New Jersey Handmaidens. During one of her research trips Atwood found a fundamentalist Christian group: The People of Hope. This group believed that the world should go back to its “roots”, based on the rules and teaching of the bible. The women that belonged to this group were called “the Handmaidens of God”. From that she found the name for her dystopia’s subservient female characters, and the inspiration for the fictional religious group who would take over the government.
We then took a look at a quote from an unpublished essay by Atwood called “The Handmaid’s Tale – Before and After”. The quote we looked says the following: “It’s set in the near future, in a United States which is in the hands of a power-hungry elite who have used their own brand of ‘Bible-based’ religion as an excuse for the suppression of the majority of the population. It’s about what happens at the intersection of several trends, all of which are with us today: the right of right-wing fundamentalism as a political force, the decline of the Caucasian birth rate in North America and northern Europe, the rise of in infertility and birth-defect rates, due, some say, to increased chemical pollutant and radiation levels, as well as to sexually transmitted diseases“. After the research we did we can conclude that Atwood has deliberately and directly made references to the reality lived during the time the novel was written to, in a way, make a prediction about what would happen to the world in the future.
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