The Handmaid's Tale, the show, frequently falls into the trap of making Gilead look glamorous-all those richly-decorated, tastefully-appointed interiors, the sumptuous costuming for every possible occasion, the heavy, and irresistibly affecting, ritualization of every aspect of life. Since my main association with The Handmaid's Tale these days is the ( increasingly frustrating) TV show, it was fascinating to observe how Atwood anticipated and avoided many of the adaptation's pitfalls. Or the centrality of the prohibition on women reading to its depiction of Gilead's repressiveness, how Offred has to stop herself from letting on that she can read, how the public sphere has been remade to eliminate "temptations" by, for example, removing the names from store signs, how the promise of illicit reading materials is what draws Offred to the Commander-and how, in the end, her choice to create a testimonial of her experiences in Gilead is the ultimate form of rebellion and resistance. Or the fact that its horror is rooted less in the abuses that Offred experiences than it is in boredom, in Offred's yearning for even the slightest variety and stimulation in her proscribed life. There are things about it I hadn't remembered, such as the streak of dark humor that runs through it, delivered via Offred's catty mockery of everyone she meets, her cruel but accurate assessments of their physical imperfections, gross personal habits, and obvious unhappiness, even within a system that is supposedly perfect. It remains a viscerally powerful work, and one that establishes a template for writing about totalitarianism and how people live under it. I reread The Handmaid's Tale before starting The Testaments, my first time returning to it since I read it in my early 20s. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, but that just brings us to the more important question: what does The Testaments accomplish? What does it tell us that The Handmaid's Tale didn't? An idealist would say that this is just the right moment, when far-right, fascist movements all over the world are gaining prominence, many of them with an essentialist, instrumentalized view of women's role in society at the very core of their ideology. Why choose to answer (some) of those questions now, thirty-five years after the original novel's publication? A cynic would say that this is a cash-in, a reflection of how the original novel has dominated the zeitgeist since the premiere of the television series based on it in 2017. Why write a sequel to The Handmaid's Tale? Why write one in 2019? In the acknowledgements section of The Testaments, Margaret Atwood writes that, since the publication of Handmaid in 1985, she has received multiple queries about the fate of its characters and world.
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