The Handmaid’s Tale has long been a celebrated piece of fiction – it hasn’t been out of print since it was first published in 1985 – but it’s never been so frighteningly relatable until now.
Margaret Atwood’s sinister novel tells the story of a dystopian society set in the former borders of the United States of America where all women’s rights and legal automony have been stripped away.
Listen: Why The Handmaid’s Tale is the most important TV show of 2017.
The protagonist Offred, along with every other woman still able to bear children, is forced to become a Handmaid (a surrogate sex slave) for the wealthy families to bear them children.
Dressed in distinctive, conservative red capes and gloves and white vision obscurring bonnets, they have to lie between the husband and the wife while they have intercourse, all the while holding the wife’s hand.
Top Comments
"If a world where women have no say or rights over what they can do with their own bodies sounds eerily familiar"
Then you should congratulate your internet service provider on finding a way to communicate with people in alternate realities, because here in the real world that's the polar opposite of demonstrable reality of every country in the western world & has been for quite some time now.
'It's never been so frighteningly relatable'
WOW. Just wow...
Im sorry but what on earth are u talking about? Women have more freedom now than at any point in history.
What a bizarre thing to read on a female oriented site.