Dystopian and Speculative Fiction

Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985) is the most commonly studied dystopian novel on the AQA A-Level English Literature specification. This lesson examines the novel in detail and situates it within the broader tradition of dystopian and speculative fiction — a genre that uses imagined futures to critique present realities.

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What Is Dystopian Fiction?

Dystopian fiction imagines a society that is the opposite of a utopia — a society characterised by oppression, surveillance, dehumanisation, and the suppression of individual freedom. The genre is inherently political: it takes existing social tendencies and extrapolates them to their logical extremes.

Key Characteristics of Dystopian Fiction

Feature	Detail
Extrapolation	Takes real social trends and imagines what happens if they are taken to extremes
Totalitarian control	The state controls every aspect of life — language, reproduction, history, identity
Propaganda and surveillance	Information is controlled; citizens are monitored; truth is manufactured
Loss of individuality	Characters are defined by their function, not their identity
A resistant protagonist	The central character recognises the dystopia and attempts (often unsuccessfully) to resist
A cautionary purpose	The text warns: this could happen here, if we are not careful

The Dystopian Tradition

Text	Author	Year	Key Concern
We	Yevgeny Zamyatin	1924	Collectivism vs. individuality; the mathematically ordered state
Brave New World	Aldous Huxley	1932	Pleasure as control; genetic engineering; consumerism
Nineteen Eighty-Four	George Orwell	1949	Totalitarianism; surveillance; the corruption of language
Fahrenheit 451	Ray Bradbury	1953	Censorship; the destruction of literature; mass media as control
The Handmaid's Tale	Margaret Atwood	1985	Theocratic patriarchy; reproductive control; the erasure of women's rights
Never Let Me Go	Kazuo Ishiguro	2005	Bioethics; what it means to be human; complicity

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Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale (1985)

Context

Atwood wrote the novel in West Berlin in 1984 — symbolically significant, given that the Berlin Wall physically embodied the division between freedom and totalitarianism. She has said that everything in the novel has happened somewhere, at some time: "I made a rule for myself: I would not include anything that human beings had not already done."

Historical and Political Context

Context	Connection to the Novel
The American Religious Right	The rise of the Moral Majority and the election of Ronald Reagan (1980) — the alliance of evangelical Christianity and political conservatism
Anti-feminist backlash	The defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment (1982); growing conservative opposition to feminism, abortion, and reproductive rights
Iranian Revolution (1979)	A theocratic revolution that reversed women's rights overnight — demonstrating how quickly freedoms can be lost
Puritan New England	The historical roots of American theocracy — the Salem witch trials, the regulation of women's behaviour, the equation of female sexuality with sin
Totalitarian regimes	Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Ceausescu's Romania (which banned contraception to increase the birth rate)

Atwood's Key Principle: "Speculative fiction" (her preferred term) does not invent — it recombines. Every element of Gilead has a historical precedent.

The Republic of Gilead

Feature	Detail
Theocracy	A fundamentalist Christian regime that has overthrown the US government
Environmental crisis	Pollution and nuclear contamination have caused widespread infertility — the pretext for the regime's reproductive policies
Hierarchy	Women are divided into rigid categories: Wives (blue), Handmaids (red), Marthas (green), Econowives, Aunts
The Ceremony	Ritualised rape — the Commander has sex with the Handmaid while she lies between the Wife's legs, "legitimised" by the biblical story of Rachel and Bilhah (Genesis 30:1–3)
Language control	Reading and writing are forbidden for women. Greetings are prescribed: "Blessed be the fruit" / "May the Lord open"
Surveillance	Eyes (secret police), Guardians, walls displaying executed "gender traitors" and abortionists

Key Themes

1. Power and the Body