https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/may/25/the-handmaids-tale-on-tv-too-disturbing-even-for-margaret-atwood

The Handmaid’s Tale was chosen for critical review for its distinctively different content and narrative style as well as the gripping plot, the presence of a flawed heroine (Rigney, 1987. pp114) who appeals to one’s humanity and perhaps most importantly, the novel’s outstanding political relevance in the midst of world politics today.

“You leave your body.”
When my first child was born, things went seriously sideways. It was the kind of birth where, had we been out on a farm somewhere, she would have asphyxiated, and I would have bled to death. This used to happen all the time, but in modern medicine we have “interventions.” And sometimes they don’t work. A Pitocin drip will not help labor progress if the baby is twisted around like a nine-pound pretzel in a position that inherently prevents delivery.

The Republic of Gilead is a patriarchal regime and upon its rise to power, women are its first victims.

Despite being written over 30 years ago in a world very different to the one we are now confronted with, the TV show has captured the zeitgeist and it is resonating deeply with audiences thanks to its terrifyfing real-life parallels.

It's hard to imagine a book that resonates with our times as powerfully as The Handmaid's Tale. Margaret Atwood's cult 1985 novel tells the story of Gilead, an authoritarian, gender-segregated state that reduces fertile women, who aren't allowed to read, write or own property, to "handmaids" – sexual slaves, forced to bear children for high-status men called Commanders.

Recently, Elisabeth Moss, the star of Hulu’s new adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, the 1985 dystopian Margaret Atwood novel, was a guest on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. Colbert invited Moss to explain the show’s premise to those who might be unfamiliar with it. “It’s about, in America, a right-wing totalitarian fundamentalist regime …,” Moss said, smiling coyly.

The Handmaid’s Tale, an adaptation of the beloved 1986 dystopian novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, comes out today. It stars Elisabeth Moss as Offred, a “handmaid”—someone whose sole purpose is to get pregnant for rich couples in a world in which most women are infertile.

chose to analyse the 1970’s version of the movie ‘A Handmaids Tale’. It’s based on a popular novel by author Margaret Atwood. The movie intrigues me as it explores feminist, socialist and political issues.

Shaping identity is at the core of most every individuals being. Identity defines you as well as separates and shapes each individual giving them the qualities that makes them unique in a vast pool of the sameness. Generally people have an undying will to characterize themselves and will go to great lengths to achieve a sense of distinction. We separate ourselves from the pack with different clothes, make-up, personality traits, language and even jobs that stamp out an impression of what we become and help carve out our individuality.

The novel is entitled The Handmaid's Tale, not A Handmaid's Tale, so although we can never be entirely sure of the identity of this Handmaid - or, as Pieixoto points out in the Historical Notes, of her existence at all (even allowing for the fact that she is of course an invention of Atwood's) it is clear that we are focusing on one individual. And this is a significant part of Atwood's message. Whoever the Handmaid is, she is to be viewed as an individual, a person who is important in her own right. This means acknowledging her unique personality: Pieixoto and his colleague, Professor Wray, say that ‘our author was one of many.' They insist that they have tried to ‘establish an identity for the narrator', but in fact the core of her real identity - her thoughts and feelings - are ignored by them. Yet the novel focusses largely on her inner life: seven of the fifteen sections are entitled ‘Night' and Offred tells us, at the start of chapter 7, that:

One of the most important themes of The Handmaid's Tale is the presence and manipulation of power. On the one hand, Gilead is a theocratic dictatorship, so power is imposed entirely from the top. There is no possibility of appeal, no method of legally protecting oneself from the government, and no hope that an outside power will intervene.

Because Gilead was formed in response to the crisis caused by dramatically decreased birthrates, the state’s entire structure, with its religious trappings and rigid political hierarchy, is built around a single goal: control of reproduction.

Gilead is a strictly hierarchical society, with a huge difference between the genders. As soon as the Gileadean revolutionaries take over after terrorism destroys the US government, they fire all women from their jobs and drain their bank accounts, leaving Offred desperate and dependent.

In The Handmaid's Tale, nearly everyone's identity has been stripped away. Although the most powerful have more privileges than some of the others, everyone has been renamed and repositioned.

he struggle to define and maintain identity within the context of culture and gender is a central theme in The Handmaid's Tale. The conflict to define this identity is tangled with membership in varying cultural and gender groups and roles. How does a character such as Offred define herself in a world that defines her as a wife, a mother, and ultimately as a Handmaid?

Gilead is a strictly hierarchical society, with a huge difference between the genders. As soon as the Gileadean revolutionaries take over after terrorism destroys the US government, they fire all women from their jobs and drain their bank accounts, leaving Offred desperate and dependent.

To Wiley, who appears in Hulu’s adaptation as Moira, Atwood’s dystopian tale “embodies everything to me that the word feminism means.” Wiley’s view contrasts with recent statements from Elisabeth Moss, who plays lead character Offred, and from Atwood herself. Moss sparked controversy in April on a cast panel at the Tribeca Film Festival when she said the show is “not a feminist story” but a “human story because women’s rights are human rights.” Moss and Atwood shared similar sentiments in an earlier interview with TIME.

Margaret Atwood’s dystopian feminist novel The Handmaid’s Tale has been adapted into a television series. The novel describes an America where a fundamentalist Christian coup swiftly installs a government that excludes all women from civil life. Gender roles become a matter policed by law enforcement. Some women are merely confined to the home, others are forced into slavery

Margaret Atwood commented on the state of women’s rights and what the success of “The Handmaid’s Tale” says about the world at Variety‘s Power of Women luncheon.
Atwood, being Canadian herself, joked to the audience that Americans could find “a nice hot cup of tea and a mattress in the church basement” in their neighbor to the north should they feel compelled to flee from the current political state. But she added that Canadians have been impressed by the way Americans have “mobilized and pushed back.”

Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian novel about a society with a plummeting birth rate, in 1984. In the book, a totalitarian American regime strips women of their rights and forces those who are fertile to become “handmaids” to bear children for wealthy men and their barren wives.

It is impossible to read The Handmaid's Tale without being aware that issues of gender and aspects of feminism are central to the novel. Atwood is well-known for her feminist views, though she is never narrow-minded, and in The Handmaid's Tale she raises questions rather than simply asserting her views.

In a world as bleak as the one author Margaret Atwood created for The Handmaid's Tale, it's hard to see a glimmer of hope. In the early episodes of Hulu's new adaptation of the 1985 dystopian novel, that "glimmer" is Ofglen.

The Handmaid’s Tale — an even darker timeline than real-life 2018 — returns with its second season tomorrow. As we prepare to reacquaint ourselves with TV’s foremost patriarchal dystopia, the Cut has created a handy taxonomy of all the possible roles for women in the totalitarian state of Gilead, based on source material from Margaret Atwood’s book and what we’ve seen so far in the show. All the options are bad, some are worse, yet each is uniquely awful in its own special way.

I am a gender traitor, and I am proud to be one.
I read The Handmaid’s Tale when I was in my tween years. I remember being deeply affected by it for several reasons; it made me consider things about misogyny and modern oppression of women that no one had ever really told me about. It also made me think for the first time about fertility; the power of my body as a cisgender woman, and the idea that it could be taken from me, commodified, owned and sold if the wrong future became a reality. When you’re young, you never consider the idea that the world could go backwards, rather than progress and get better for everyone.

Women aren't supposed to use their minds in the world of The Handmaid's Tale. They're forbidden from reading, working outside the home, or even spending money. The small minority who are fertile are forced to become de-eroticized baby-making machines, or, as the narrator thinks of it, empty childbearing vessels.

Atwood, who is famous for depicting themes of betrayal and treachery through the creation of strong and vulnerable female characters, produces a vivid set of possibilities with the women of The Handmaid's Tale. The interplay between Aunts and Handmaids-to-be creates an intense effort at subjugation and indoctrination.

The Republic of Gilead, an adaptation of the society detailed in Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel “The Handmaid’s Tale,” strips women of all statuses of their rights, forcing them to live out lives of servitude in a patriarchal society.

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) demonstrates how clothing can be used to enforce rigid, fixed identities as the government of Gilead attempts to control the population in the dystopian novel. It establishes the limitations of clothing and how it can be used as a method of containment and repression. The protagonist Offred, along with other women in the text, are required to wear certain clothes that reflect their role and status in society.

“The Handmaid’s Tale” series on Hulu was tailor-made for Trump’s America, and nothing sums up the horror of Margaret Atwood’s totalitarian Gilead better than the “salvaging” ritual at the end of Episode One. The color red, worn by the Handmaids, becomes the key visual component, symbolic of both menstrual blood and political rage.