A perfect offering

Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood is suddenly the flavour of the season. Her 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale has been adapted into a series, airing on AXN, while another of her novels, Alias Grace has been adapted into a six-part series and is airing on Netflix.

In her introduction to the series tie-in of The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood talks of writing in 1984, in West Berlin. Visits to several countries behind the Iron Curtain led to Atwood witnessing “the wariness, the feeling of being spied upon, the silences, the changes of subject,” which had an influence on the novel.

The Handmaid’s Tale is set in a future where the United States is overthrown by the Republic of Gilead, a theocracy where women have no rights. Due to toxic environment and sexually transmitted disease, human beings are increasingly sterile. Powerful men or Commanders use fertile women as handmaids to bear them children.

The commanders have ritualised sex with the handmaids to impregnate them in their wives’ presence. The handmaids are not allowed to keep the children born to them, they are property of the family they are serving. The handmaids do not even have names, they are called by their commander’s first name with the prefix “Of” so the narrator is Offred. Atwood also writes Offred is a play on offering—religious or sacrificial.

The Handmaid’s Tale was made into a movie in 1990. With a screenplay by Harold Pinter and directed by Volker Schlöndorff, the film starred Natasha Richardson as Offred, Robert Duvall (Commander), Faye Dunaway as his wife, Serena Joy, and Aidan Quinn as the chauffeur Nick. The film was dismissed as “paranoid poppycock — just like the book,” by Owen Gleiberman, writing for Entertainment Weekly.

In these anxious times, however, the television series and the book have resonated with many. Created by Bruce Miller, the show has Elisabeth Moss as Offred, Joseph Fiennes as the Commander, Yvonne Strahovski as Serena Joy and Max Minghella as Nick.

The series has naturally changed some things. The most dramatic and unsettling is giving names to the characters. By giving Offred a birth name, June, the show shuts a door. Her name is not mentioned in the book and in a way Offred stands for every nameless statistic of oppressive regimes. She could be anyone and no one. By positively identifying the Commander as Fred Waterford, giving Nick a second name, the narrative structure has been changed probably for dramatic effect.

The novel ends with a conference in the future, in 2195, which has Gopal Chatterjee of the Department of Western Philosophy from the University of Baroda as one of the speakers! It is at the conference we learn that Professor Pieixoto discovered Offred’s story in the form of 30 cassette tapes recorded over popular music. In his talk on ‘Problems of Authentication in Reference to The Handmaid's Tale’, we learn of the difficulty of finding out who Offred was and her fate—did she escape, was she killed, did she meet her daughter?

The costumes described in the novel with wives wearing blue to signify the Virgin Mary and handmaids wearing red for the blood of childbirth are used in the series as well. The face-hiding bonnets, Atwood says is inspired by an “old Dutch cleanser packet from the 1940s.”

Though set in a dystopian future, the series takes a break from the bleak greys to feature eerily pastoral scenes—which makes the summary executions that much more unsettling. As Atwood succinctly writes, “If I was to create an imaginary garden, I wanted the toads to be real.”

Atwood, who has a cameo in the series, says the book was originally called Offred but changed to The Handmaid’s Tale echoing Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and also “in reference to fairy tales: the story told by the central character, for later or remote listeners, of the unbelievable, the fantastic. ”

Apart from being about control and the different forms it takes, The Handmaid’s Tale is also about reading, writing and the power of words. Offred’s illegal game of scrabble with the Commander has the frisson and sensuality of illicit sex. The Latin quotation etched in the closet, Nolite Te Bastardes Carborundorum, is a double act of rebellion.

As far as the cast goes, Joseph Fiennes makes for a sexy and likeable Commander—he is not the grey haired fuddy-duddy of the novel. Elisabeth Moss channels her Peggy Olson from Mad Men into Offred. By using an international cast, the series addresses the criticism of The Handmaid’s Tale being a ‘White Feminist’ story.

With most of the novel featured in the first two episodes, the series branches out with new plotlines in consequent episodes. If it prompts people to return to reading, that is not a bad thing.

The Handmaid’s Tale airs on AXN on Mondays at 10 pm