Why should you read "The Handmaid's Tale"? - Naomi R. Mercer

Why Read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale?

The video explains why to read Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” framing it as a chilling dystopian/speculative warning about how societies can slide into authoritarian control—especially through ideological, political, and cultural backlash against progress.

Main Plot / Premise

• In Atwood’s near-future United States, a Christian fundamentalist coup installs the theocratic regime the Republic of Gilead.
• Although “theory” suggests restrictions apply broadly, the reality is stark: a small group of men holds all power, with women reduced to controlled roles.
• Women are divided into rigid social classes and even color-coded clothing marks their function and status.
• The regime bans women from reading and from moving freely in public.
• Fertile women (“handmaids”) are forced into state-engineered sexual abuse to produce children for the government.

Key Themes and Highlights

• The video emphasizes that utopian vs. dystopian writing often mirrors real political trends:
  • Utopias sell an ideal blueprint.
  • Dystopias don’t have to be literal predictions—they’re warnings about paths to collapse.
• Published in 1985, the novel is linked to the era’s conservative attacks on second-wave feminism and its push for legal and social equality.
• Atwood’s “rules” for writing include using only elements that have already occurred in human history—adding to the story’s plausibility and horror.

Historical Parallels / Setting

• Gilead is set in Cambridge, Massachusetts, connected (in the video) to the Puritan theocracy that once ruled the area.
• The regime’s atmosphere is compared to Puritan strictness: moral rigidity, modest dress, punishment/banishment of dissenters, and total regulation of relationships.
• The parallels are also personal for Atwood, who studied Puritans at Harvard and may be connected to Mary Webster, a woman accused of witchcraft who survived execution.

How the Story Unfolds (Through Offred)

• The narrator perspective centers on Offred, a handmaid living in a commander’s household.
• Before the coup, Offred had the familiar life of a husband, child, job, and normal middle-class freedom.
• After Gilead’s takeover, she’s stripped of identity, separated from family, and reduced—via her own grim description—to a reproductive instrument (“a two-legged womb”).
• At first, she’s willing to accept the loss of rights for “stability,” but control spreads into:
  • language
  • behavior
  • thought
• One quoted concept is that Offred must “compose” herself like speech—suggesting language shapes identity, and control of language becomes control of the self.
• The plot is driven by the possibility of resistance, including people who break political, intellectual, and sexual rules.

Why the Message Lands

• The closing emphasis is on the novel’s warning about complacency—how unfair power can be established and normalized.
• Overall takeaway: Atwood’s dystopia remains relevant because it shows how quickly societies can trade freedom for “order,” and how deeply that trade can reshape human lives.

Personalities Mentioned

• Margaret Atwood
• Offred (protagonist)
• Naomi R. Mercer (speaker/presenter)
• Mary Webster (historical Puritan figure, referenced as a possible ancestry link)