Historical precedents for the events in The Handmaid's Tale?
June 23, 2018 7:31 AM   Subscribe

Margaret Atwood famously said that she hadn't made up any of the horrific crimes in the Handmaid's Tale, that everything she described had been done SOMEWHERE at some point. Now that the TV show is in season 2 and going beyond the scope of the novel, I'm wondering whether the show's writers are keeping to that rule. I"m especially wondering whether anyone has ever compiled a resource online for these references (from the book and/or the series). I'm in a dystopian mood and I want to read about, e.g., forced adoptions in Argentina. Thanks!
posted by catesbie to Media & Arts (4 answers total) 20 users marked this as a favorite
 


Best answer: From The New Yorker: "One morning, I accompanied her to the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, at the University of Toronto, where she has donated her archive...Another box was labelled “Handmaid’s Tale: Background,” and Atwood pried the box open to reveal files containing sheaves of newspaper clippings from the mid-eighties.

“Clip-clippety-clip, out of the newspaper I clipped things,” she said, as we looked through the cuttings. There were stories of abortion and contraception being outlawed in Romania, and reports from Canada lamenting its falling birth rate, and articles from the U.S. about Republican attempts to withhold federal funding from clinics that provided abortion services. There were reports about the threat to privacy posed by debit cards, which were a novelty at the time, and accounts of U.S. congressional hearings devoted to the regulation of toxic industrial emissions, in the wake of the deadly gas leak in Bhopal, India. An Associated Press item reported on a Catholic congregation in New Jersey being taken over by a fundamentalist sect in which wives were called “handmaidens”—a word that Atwood had underlined."

Link to the archived collection. Maybe someone can help you find an index to those clippings?
posted by MonkeyToes at 10:47 AM on June 23, 2018 [7 favorites]


This is one of the things most striking to me with the show. Where Game of Thrones invented new sexual violence against women that wasn’t “even” in the books Handmaid Tale really has had almost everything that I can see have real world equivalents either now or previously, the Handmaids being brought into the kitchen to be burned on the range is a clear nod to “kitchen accidents” as systematically applied domestic violence in south-Asia, offers being told that she would be kept imprisoned until birth echoes the situation in Ireland where until recently there have been cases of women being forced to carry pregnancies to minimum viable term and then cesarianed.
posted by Iteki at 2:05 AM on June 24, 2018


Response by poster: These are awesome!

By which I mean terrifying.

But: what I was looking for. So thanks!
posted by catesbie at 7:54 AM on June 24, 2018


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