The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is a frighteningly credible, if somewhat tongue-in-cheek, novel of a possible future America. Replete with biblical references and peppered with traumatic glimpses of the underlying cruelty of the despotic regime of Gilead, the novel presents the effect of the utter subjugation of women on one victim, known only to the reader as Offred (indicating that she is the Handmaid of "Fred," whom she calls the Commander). While Atwood's style and …

…risk, and the goodwill of a few others, she eventually escapes to freedom. Two hundred years later, Gilead is looked back upon as a curious period of cultural evolution, a failed experiment in militant religious government. The individuals who suffered through that period are long gone, and the smugness of the speakers at the Gileadean Studies Twelfth Symposium suggests that future man believes no return into such governmental oppression as that of Gilead is possible.