But in the United States, they asked, “How long have we got?” The handwriting was evidently already on the wall, back in 1985. In fact, some of it appeared on an actual wall, the seawall of Venice, California, where an anonymous hand spray-painted “The Handmaid’s Tale Is Already Here.” The book then went on to win the Los Angeles Times Book Award and to be nominated for the Booker Prize in the U.K., and to win the Governor General’s Award in Canada, among others. So someone must have appreciated its virtues, such as they were.

  And since that time, the book has never stopped selling. I suppose it’s because new generations keep appearing to be terrified by it. People put it onto high-school courses, and other people then try to get it removed from them, partly because it has sex in it, or because those people erroneously believe it is anti-Christian, which indicates what an odd view of Christianity they must have. But we’ll deal more extensively with that subject later.

  This book has since morphed into a film, an opera, a ballet, a number of theatrical productions, and—forthcoming—a graphic novel rendition, and a television series. But, the finest tribute of all: People dress up as Handmaids on Hallowe’en. And other people Know What They Are Supposed to Be! My lowly Handmaid in her strange red dress has taken her place among the Klingons, Minnie Mice, Hulks, and Wonder Women of the Hallowe’en costume world. How thrilling is that?

  I’ll now get down to the nitty-gritty. I’ve been asked to speak about this novel from various angles, and I will attempt to do that. I’ll talk about its context—the time in which it was created—and about how and why I set about writing it, and about the literary and historical influences on it, and about some of the choices I made when I was constructing its world. And then I will attempt to place it in the present day—the time we find ourselves in, right here and now. Does this novel still have relevance? If so, what and why? Can novels be prophetic, and if not, why not?

  All of that is a tall order for a short talk, so I’ll roll up my sleeves, figuratively, and get down to work.

  But first, I’ll tell you a true story. Once upon a time, maybe twenty years ago, myself and my spouse, Graeme Gibson, were throwing a party for the Ontario chapter of the Writers’ Union of Canada. Backstory information: “Ontario” is a province, the Canadian equivalent of a state. “Canada” is a country, the equivalent, in population, of Mexico City. The Writers’ Union was founded by us in the early 1970s because Canada did not have any agents at that time, so writers were entirely at the mercy of publishers, who lied to them about such things as what other writers got by way of an advance. Things are different now, though it’s still true that “professional writer” as a job description is a cross between gambler, start-up entrepreneur, and sleight-of-hand card trickster. You have to run very fast to stay where you are, and if you want a pension plan, don’t be a writer. It’s almost as hard as being a twenty-three-year-old country singer. Most have day jobs.

  One of the writers at this party of ours was a young woman of thirty-five, who announced she was having a heart attack. As she had already had a heart attack, this was serious. We kicked everyone out of the living room and Graeme did deep breathing with her while I called 911. Soon, two strapping young male paramedics arrived with their paraphernalia, their muscles bulging. (They have to have bulging muscles so they can heave the bodies around.) They expelled us from the room and got to work, and the following conversation then took place:

  first paramedic: Do you know whose house this is?

  second paramedic: No, whose house is it?

  first paramedic: It’s Margaret Atwood’s house!

  second paramedic: Margaret Atwood! Is she still alive?

  It turned out that the young woman wasn’t having a heart attack after all. She was having, and I quote, “a ball of gas as big as a grapefruit.” She was just so excited to be in my house.

  But I tell this story to illustrate a well-known fact: any writer whose work you study in high school is dead By Definition. And since a lot of kids have studied The Handmaid’s Tale in high school over the years, there are a lot of people who are surprised to discover that I am still alive. It’s getting so I’m sometimes surprised by that myself. But such is the effect of fame, even a moderate amount of it. You can get a zucchini mould—usually advertised at the backs of comic books—which, if placed around a growing zucchini, produces a zucchini in the shape of Elvis Presley’s head. It could work with an eggplant, as well. I have yet to reach that level of fame.

  And I had not got even close to the zucchini mould level when I began writing The Handmaid’s Tale. Since some of you were not born then, and since others among you were of tender age, let me take you back in time.

  First, me. Born in November 1939, just after the beginning of the Second World War. That means I am of the generation that remembers Hitler and Stalin, and not just from the history books. In 1949 I was ten, and thus read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four when it came out in paperback. I was fifteen in 1955, when Elvis made his TV debut. I was twenty in 1960, thirty in 1970, and forty in 1980. I always make a chart like this for characters in my books: I want to know how old they were in relation to major world events because our personal histories interact with what’s going on in the world outside us.

  In 1984, we were in a mini-backlash phase against hippies, women’s liberation, and suchlike modes of social behaviour. In music, I think it was Late Disco. Hippies had burst forth in approximately 1968, just after beatniks and existentialists and folk singers and the Beatles; they had been preceded by the birth control pill, the advent of pantyhose, and miniskirts. (Those three things are connected, especially the pantyhose and the miniskirts.) Women’s Lib, as it was called at the time, got going in approximately 1969. I wasn’t there: I was in Edmonton, Alberta, which was far, far away from New York City. There was not yet any Internet. I heard about these doings in the form of letters from friends. I was also too old to have been a hippie, though I did go through the existentialism, and the folk singing, and the black eyeliner. Let’s not forget that!

  Feminism then entered its second wave. The first wave was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its proponents were called suffragettes, and their goal was female suffrage, or getting the vote for women. Then they got the vote, and then there was the Depression—back to the home, women, to make room for jobs for men, though Amelia Earhart was a model for adventurous tomboys, who featured in magazine fiction—and then came the war—into the factories, women, to make weapons, and to appear in Rosie the Riveter posters, flexing your cute little biceps. Then, after the war, back to the home, women, to make room for jobs for the men; you were supposed to have four kids, a washer-dryer, a suburban bungalow, and Total Fulfillment through having discarded your brain. Meanwhile, the men back from the war were restless; they missed their freedom and adrenalin hit from the near-death experiences they had undergone. Along came Hugh Hefner, playing his Peter Pan flute, and calling to them: Why are you stuck in that domestic rut? Bungalows are boring! Ditch the wife and kids and come away to play! And so they did, giving rise eventually to the TV series Mad Men.

  And that’s when Betty Friedan came in with her book The Feminine Mystique, which I was reading in Vancouver in 1964. Her book was a protest against the lack of brain proposed by the back-to-the-home spinners of the late 1940s and the 1950s. Here is a spoof of that kind of spin, from the spurious Housekeeping Monthly 1955, called “The Good Wife’s Guide”:

  Never complain if he comes home late or goes out to dinner, or other places of entertainment without you. Instead, try to understand his world of strain and pressure….Don’t complain if he’s late home for dinner or even if he stays out all night. Count this as minor compared to what he might have gone through that day….Don’t ask him questions about his actions or question his judgment or integrity. Remember, he is the master of the house and as such will always exercise his will with fairness and truthfulness. You have no right to question him….A good wife always knows her place.

  This could as well have been called “The Roman Slave’s Guide” or “The Serf’s Guide in the Year 1000.”

  Friedan’s Feminine Mystique struck a chord with all those American university-educated women who’d been told their real degree was an M.R.S. But the “master of the house” style of brainwashing didn’t make much of a dint on young Canadian women. We were living in a cultural backwater, and were still doing the Amelia Earhart flying tomboy thing. Plus, we had a women’s magazine called Chatelaine, with an editor called Doris Anderson, who’d been raised in a rooming house run by her mother after her father had deserted them, so she wasn’t having any of the “fairness and truthfulness” pitch. She dealt with many women’s issues head-on long before the women’s movement hit in 1969, and she had to fight male management of the magazine chain at every step. They were quite keen on the “fairness and truthfulness” pitch. Just like Roman aristocrats.

  On with the 1970s. It was a time of turmoil in the land of feminism: women of colour protested that they were not represented, and so did lesbians; Ms. magazine with Gloria Steinem appeared, plus many other publications; and on it went. In Canada, younger female writers were so busy trying to make a space where writers of any gender could be published and remunerated at all—founding magazines and publishing companies, building out infrastructure such as author tours and festivals and writers-in-residence at universities and public lending rights in connection with libraries, fight, fight, fight on all those fronts—that we were likely to see our male colleagues as fellow combatants rather than enemies.

  By the early 1980s, fatigue had set in among some of the 1970s battling feminists, and they were resting on their oars. Meanwhile, the religious right was mounting a counter-attack. They wanted to go back to the 1950s, at least to the “Good Wife’s Guide” version of that decade—skip the rock ’n’ roll—but this time they wanted it shored up with the puritanical religious dogma that had underlain it all along. “He for God only, she for God in him,” as John Milton had spelled it out in Paradise Lost. And, as Saint Paul had it, women could redeem themselves only through childbirth. This was a lot too close for comfort to the Kinder, Kirche, Küche—children, church, kitchen—advocated for women by the Nazis.

  Remember what I said about Hitler? I was a great reader of literature about the Second World War, and I knew that he’d announced his platform very early on, in his book, Mein Kampf. This book was a non-starter at the time—Germans, at first, thought Hitler was a nut—good call—so he downplayed his real agenda until he got himself elected. Then he laid waste to democracy, and set about doing what he originally said he wanted to do.

  So I believed two things. (1) That if true believers say they’ll do a thing, when they get the chance they’ll do it. (2) Whoever says “It can’t happen here” is wrong. Anything can happen anywhere, given the right conditions, as history has demonstrated time and time again. And to those two, I’ll add (3): Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Again, there are many demonstration cases.

  Thus I set about writing The Handmaid’s Tale. I began it in note form, but set about it in earnest in the spring of 1984. We were living in West Berlin. The Berlin Wall had not yet come down—that was to happen in 1989—and there was no clue that it would come down anytime soon. For the flavour of those Cold War spy-versus-spy days in West Germany, read John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy series, or see the Alec Guinness TV series version; and for the flavour of East Germany then, see the film The Lives of Others. That’s what it felt like.

  So it was a good place to begin writing The Handmaid’s Tale. I finished it in the spring of 1985, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where I was an M.F.A. chair at the University of Alabama. That was a good place to finish, for very different reasons. Unfreedom was practised there too, but only for certain people, such as those with darker skin and, oddly, bicycle riders. (“Don’t ride a bicycle here,” I was told, “ ’cause they’ll think you’re a Communist and run you off the road.”) Call those two locations the two sides of the coin.

  The Handmaid’s Tale set out to answer a couple of theoretical questions: (1) If the United States were to become a dictatorship or absolutist government, what sort of government would it call itself? (2) If women’s place is in the home, and if women are now out of the home and running all over the place like squirrels, how do you stuff them back into the home and make them stay there?

  The answer to (1), in the book, is: It would be a religious dictatorship, like Iran…which had become one of those right after I myself visited it in 1978. It would not be a Communist dictatorship, like Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, which I had also visited, later, in 1984. I thought at the time that an absolutist government in the name of liberal democracy would be a contradiction in terms, but I should have remembered McCarthyism; and now that we have digital surveillance, such an absolutism is well within our reach.

  The answer to (2)—how to cram the women back into the homes—was simple: dial back history a hundred years—no, even less. Take away women’s jobs and their access to money—the latter via their bank and credit cards. Oh, and their most recently won civil rights, such as the right to vote and the right to own property, and the right to their own children. To do that, you’d change the law. Some people are fond of invoking “the rule of law,” but they should remember that there have been some very unjust laws. The Nuremburg Laws—directed against Jews—were laws. The Fugitive Slave Act was a law. The decree forbidding literacy for American slaves in the South was a law. The Roman grind-the-peasant tax laws were laws. I could go on for a very long time on that subject.

  I made a rule for myself in the writing of this book: I would not include any detail that people had not already done, sometime, somewhere; or that they lacked the technology to do. In other words, I couldn’t just make stuff up. A number of the historical precedents can be found in the Epilogue, which claims to be a lecture on the text given a few hundred years after the events described.

  I set the novel in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Here is why.

  I attended Harvard University in the years 1961 to 1963 and then 1965 to 1967, and while there I took some courses from Perry Miller, who, along with F.O. Matthiessen, was instrumental in establishing American literature and civilization as an academic discipline. What I first studied under his wing was the seventeenth century—that is, the Puritan century in New England. This was an eye-opener to me, as the only early American literature I had studied until then was from the nineteenth century—Poe, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Whitman, Henry James, and so forth. Miller was brilliant on the seventeenth century in New England, which was far from a liberal democracy at that time. Instead, it was a theocracy. It was in favour of religious freedom for itself, but against it for anyone else. It hanged—for instance—Quakers. As these Puritans were among my ancestors, I was of course transfixed by this history.

  This society also—famously—went through the Salem witchcraft hysteria, and as one of those purported witches was also my ancestor, or so my grandmother would say on Mondays, I was even more interested. (On Wednesdays she denied the whole thing.) The Salem witch hunt has been a template for similar hysterias ever since, including McCarthyism—thus Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible. So that is why The Handmaid’s Tale is dedicated to both Perry Miller (who would have had a good laugh had he remained alive to read it) and also to Mary Webster, my possible ancestor. Mary was hanged, but the hanging didn’t take—she was still alive the next morning. That’s a good tough neck to inherit, if you’re going to stick your neck out. As I have done.

  As I’ve said, I didn’t put anything into this book that hadn’t already been done somewhere, or could be done given available technology. I drew on a wide variety of historical sources, including Romania under the Ceaușescu dictatorship, Hitler and his Polish baby-stealing and multi-wife policies for SS men, Argentina under the generals. I used the denial of literacy to American slaves, I used early Mormonism, I used group hangings in medieval times—if everyone pulls on the rope, the guilt is shared—and I used the Dionysian cult of ancient Greece, where sacrificial victims were torn apart by hand. Those are just a few.

  For the clothing, I used the illustration on the Old Dutch Cleanser package of the 1940s that traumatized me as a child—the hidden face, the white hat, the billowing skirts. But I also used mid-nineteenth-century women’s fashions, with the hide-a-face bonnets; and the sumptuary laws of medieval times, which dictated who could wear what. The colour-coding—blue for purity, red for sin and passion, and so on—is the same one employed by Christian painters of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

  The social structure of Gilead is sometimes thought to be one in which all men have superior status and all women have low status, but that is not true. It’s an absolutist or totalitarian scheme rather than one dictated strictly by gender divisions, so the spouses of high-status men have high status themselves, although lower status than their husbands. Low-status men have lower status than high-status women. That’s how these things have worked historically. Only high-status men have more than one woman available for procreation; they alone have Handmaids. This too is pretty accurate, as such things go. First wife rules the roost; other, younger wives are under her thumb. The high-status man procreates with all of them, if he can manage it. Low-status men have to make do with Econowives, who have to perform all the functions that at higher levels would be carried out by several women: first wives for social occasions, mistresses and concubines or second wives for sex, servants for housekeeping. So it goes, in the world of The Handmaid’s Tale, because so it has often gone in the real world.