The CCA ARTS REVIEW

A THE HANDMAID'S TALE FOR EVERY ERA

What makes Margaret Atwood's story so durable?

By Minje (Maggie) Zhao

It keeps on happening again and again

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) is a cautionary novel about a future where pollutants have limited the fertility of most women. The upper class patriarchy reduces all women who can conceive into reproductive machines. Offred, the main character, is the handmaiden of commander Fred, essentially his baby machine and definitely not his wife. The story is about Offred’s struggle to free herself — actually, politically, socially and any ly word you can think of.

Atwood’s novel was an immediate worldwide hit. It was translated into more than 40 languages and became a bestseller in many different countries and cultures. In 1990, Cinecom turned it into a big-budget movie directed by Volker Schlondorff (who at the time was a successful commercial director), starring Natasha Richardson, Robert Duvall and Faye Dunaway (all big stars at the time). The movie was bad but people were still interested -- in the story. Ten years later, Danish composer Poul Ruders turned The Handmaid’s Tale into an opera in 2000. So with the emergence of streaming television, you could have guessed that we would soon get The Handmaid’s Tale the television series.

The Handmaid's Tale, the movie

On April 26, 2017, Hulu released the first season of The Handmaid’s Tale. The new television series was a real success and won the Golden Globe for best television series of 2017. Elisabeth Moss, who played Offred also won the Golden Globe for best actress. The question that I want to ask is why is the story of The Handmaid’s Tale so durable and has mutated in so many different media? What’s next The Handmaid’s Tale the video game? The Handmaid’s Tale the cartoon? I thought that was a joke until I saw a month ago The Handmaid’s Tale, the graphic novel. And we already have The Handmaid’s Tale the political protests.

How has this particular story continued to attract so many people? Well, the easy answer is feminism. For at least the last seventy years women around the world have advocated for greater freedom — they’re even driving in Saudi Arabia. But that doesn’t explain the whole story, because there are, of course, many feminist tales that haven’t been picked up by multiple cultures and artists in the same way as The Handmaid's Tale.

The real reason Atwood’s story is so durable is the way it allows other artists to give their own spin on the material and ironically they do this (and we will see it in the television series) by changing the stories and qualities of the supporting characters. The story of Offred and Fred is fairly stagnant — to quote NBA players it is what is — but the supporting characters allow for all sorts of interesting artistic changes. So let’s see how the television series handles the supporting characters, which in my mind are the most interesting aspects of the series with full apologies to Elizabeth Moss.

Sorry, Lizzy

Sometimes the two main characters of The Handmaid’s Tale are boring: how many variations of the patriarchal controlling man and the controlled woman can you stand. But just when you lose interest, here come the supporting characters. In the Hulu series, many of these minor characters are vivid and alive and make the whole piece more interesting. These supporting characters lighten the story and give audiences new experiences of how to think about a dystopian patriarchal future, rather than the man guard/woman prisoner dynamic. That is one of the reasons of why the new television series make this story so compelling in 2019. And so let’s take at a look at what the Hulu series does with these roles.

Serena Joy

Fascinating

In the story of The Handmaid’s Tale, I think the most interesting supporting character is Serena. She is Fred’s wife and infertile, like most upper class women in Gilead. Serena is always in blue and nicely dressed, and her behavior and appearance are beautiful and elegant. She is Offred’s symbolic opposite and has a vexed relationship with what the government has become. Although she believes in Gilead, she is not coming close to living the life she wants or had imagined for herself. Serena is like a bird locked in a cage made of her own making.

Compared to previous versions of Serena, she is quite different and more compelling. In the book and the movie and the opera, Serena is an old lady at the beginning of the story. Though I should add and I think it’s to the point that in every version she keeps on getting younger. Make of that what you will.

In the Hulu series, she is a politician and also a beautiful, young woman with a lot of charm. Before the establishment of Gilead, Serena was educated. For a series known for its grimness, how Fred and Serena meet and fall is love is quite sweet and calls attention to itself because of that. She used to be a feminist and published her own book, but she changed her mind because she thought the survival of humankind was more important. With the rise of the Republic of Gilead she becomes little more than a trophy wife. The contrast between her former identity and her present one makes her an extremely contradictory character. And interesting.

In episode 7 and 8 of the second season, Commander Fred gets injured in an explosion and cannot work. In order to keep the family safe, Serena does Fred’s work, which in Gilead is a crime. She asks Offred to help her edit the documents and they work together as partners. She seems happy and enthusiastic while working. Maybe in a next version, Serena will be younger and even more independent. Although the existence of Gilead damages her dreams, she is a believer and that’s what makes her so fascinating. Although she is structurally in opposition to Offred, she is nonetheless kind to her. Like other upper class women who are infertile, she hates to share her husband with Offred, but she wants the baby. In this abnormal relationship between Fred, Serena and Offred, Serena struggles.

The Drama is both obvious and captivating

Her daughter Nicole’s birth awakens her sense of rebellion and gives her the bravery to advocate for her daughter’s future. She fights for her daughter’s right to read the bible. She organizes other upper class women to have some of the same rights as their husbands and for that she loses a finger. When Offred wants to escape from Gilead to Canada with Nicole, she decides to let them go because she doesn’t want this her husband’s daughter to grow up in Gilead. Serena and Offred’s relationship gets worse because of Nicole, but they negotiate with each other because of her, too. Perhaps, letting Nicole go and grow up in a free environment is Serena’s quiet protest. Maybe she is standing unconsciously against the authority, which she herself established years earlier.

The book focuses on the tragic fate of Serena’s life, but the new version gives her the courage to fight, even though she still believes in Gilead. She is kind but unpredictable, with mercurial mood swings. There is no absolute bad person there, only a complex one. This makes us more curious about her destiny and what eventually will happen to her.

Eden Spencer

Tragic and attention getting

Eden is a pious girl who is a true believer of Gilead. In the second season, she becomes Nick’s wife. In the book and previous versions, Atwood (and everyone else after her) obviously did not give her much thought. Her name isn’t even in the original book. But in Hulu series, Eden has her own story and is so important that she temporarily changes the nature of the narrative going forward.

Eden becomes Nick’s wife at the middle of second season. The government bestows her to Nick. Her understanding of life is to have a baby and serve her husband. But she can feel that Nick doesn’t love her and he doesn’t want to have children with her. When she is disappointed, she meets her true love, a man with no name who works as a guard. At first, she does not approve of her own feeling, and she thinks she is wrong because she is Nick’s wife. In 12 episode of the second seasons, Eden and Offred chat. Offred tells Eden: “I think, in this place, you grab love wherever you can find it.” This sentence lights a spark in Eden’s mind. She makes the most important decision of her life and elopes with her true love, the nameless guard. They’re arrested one day later. Her seemingly absurd behavior makes her one of the bravest women in the drama, even though she and her lover are sentenced to death.

A slight but telling smile

Before Eden, there is no one as pure and truthful in The Handmaid’s Tale universe as her. She is the one who fights with fate directly, although her pursuit of staying with true love costs her and her nameless guard’s lives. She used to a believer of Gilead. However, she became a girl who seeks out love with no fear of either what other people think or the consequences. The irony is that the person who reports her and the guard is her father. After Eden’s death, her father still feels ashamed of his daughter.

The Hula series reimaging of Eden is one of its bright spots. No one, including Atwood, ever bothers to pay attention, but her story resonates in ways that the others don’t and especially the central one of Offred and Commander Fred. It is clear that we value truth and love at all costs, though it took four versions to get there.

Ofglen

Look at the pain in her eyes

The third interesting supporting character is Ofglen. The Handmaid’s Tale has two Ofglens. I think most of the audience pays more attention to the first Ofglen, a young lesbian who’s real name is Emily. However I want to talk about the second Ofglen. She is not that important to the story, but I think she is hard to ignore because she is both normal and strangely special.

In both the book and television series, Ofglen is Offred’s shopping partner. At the beginning, she seems to be a nonresistant person. She is not as “aggressive” as other handmaids who want to fight for more freedom and rights. When Offred wants her to help Mayday — an underground Handmaid society —relay a message, she refuses. In contrast, though, when Aunt Lydia insists that all the handmaids stone Jenni, it is Ofglen who says no, “Aunt Lydia. Come on, we can’t do this.” For that simple act of humanity, Ofglen loses her tongue.

Watch out

So it is with great irony that the last we hear from Ofglen is when she straps a bomb to her body and runs into a conference hall of men. They took away her ability to talk, but she sure finds a way of making a fairly big noise anyway. What’s important to our understanding of the story is that even when you lose the ability to speak, you still have other, more explosive languages at your disposal. Her sacrifice reminds us of the nature of resistance and how it is always rooted in loss and humanity.

Every version of The Handmaid’s Tale reflects societal tensions of the moment. And most of the changes to the story occur around the edges with the supporting characters who are better able to reflect the times than Offred and Commander Fred. As feminism becomes more of the norm, by the supporting female characters become more rebellious as time goes by. These new adaptations keep on getting more and more radical.

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum”

This is sentence Offed finds in her room, and it was left by the handmaid before her. “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.” This is the last word of the previous handmaid and might be the governing logic of the Hulu series. The future is always unpredictable. But history tells us that people will fight for freedom. Everyone is a minor character in the course of the world, and it is the minor characters that illuminate the television series, offering a never-ending parade of women who say no.At the end of the second season, Offred is sitting near the window and the sunlight gently grazes against her face and shoulders. This scene looks like a painting from the middle ages. No matter how desperate and dark reality gets, no matter how violent the world is, hope still shines with humanity. We side with those who dream of a better world.

Margaret Atwood, the author who started it all

The novel also ends with an open ending, giving the reader room to imagine new futures. The end of the novel tells us Offred escapes, and let us guess what happened. However, in the end of the second season television series, Offred lets her friend escape with her daughter Nicole, but she goes back to Gilead. We all wonder that what will happen next season. What will happen to all the characters?The third season is coming soon, and it will be more attractive, because it will be totally new story that looks past Atwood’s original. And I believe, that will be a good answer of how we understand new perspectives from this most durable of stories. It will tell us a good deal of what people are thinking about feminism right now.

©Minje Zhao and the CCA Arts Review