Abstract
This essay examines Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and its sequel The Testaments (2019) with regard to intra- and extratextual circulation. As a first step, it analyzes the metafictional framing of both novels and the circulation routes of the (fictional) documents within them that supposedly contain their main narratives. The second section is dedicated to the novels’ cyclical narrative structures and circular plot movements, and further demonstrates how the Gileadean caste system functions as a circulatory infrastructure for the spreading of secrets, rumors, and documents, the true cornerstones of power in Atwood’s Gileadverse. The third and final section inquires after the political and transmedial entanglements that led to the The Handmaid’s Tale’s renewed circulation since 2017 and to the creation of its sequel in 2019. Here, I will focus on the catalytic function of the Trump presidency, the launch of the globally successful Hulu series, and transnational feminist movements as circulatory factors.
*Margaret Atwood: The Testaments, London 2019, 4–5.
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Notes
- 1.
To date (March 2022), Atwood has published 17 novels, 18 books of poetry, 8 collections of short fiction, 8 children’s books, 10 books of non-fiction, 4 graphic novels (in collaboration with graphic artists), and 11 small press editions of both poetry and fiction. For the full bibliography, see the author’s website; http://margaretatwood.ca/full-bibliography-2/ [accessed 16 Mar. 2022].
- 2.
Margaret Atwood was a guest of the DAAD [German Academic Exchange Service] Artists-in-Berlin Program in 1984: https://www.daad.de/en/alumni/gallery/portrait/margaret-atwood/ [accessed 16 Mar. 2022].
- 3.
This article is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy in the context of the Cluster of Excellence Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective – EXC 2020 – Project ID 390608380.
- 4.
Kate Abbott et al.: The 100 best TV shows of the 21st Century, in: The Guardian (16 Sept. 2019); cited from: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/sep/16/100-best-tv-shows-of-the-21st-century [accessed 16 Mar. 2022]. As of the writing of this article, the show with its four seasons has won 81 awards in different categories, including numerous Primetime Emmy Awards; https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5834204/awards [accessed 16 Mar. 2022].
- 5.
The slogan was also adapted as the title for an interview that Dominican-American writer Junot Díaz conducted with Atwood after the first season of the TV show had aired. Margaret Atwood, Junot Díaz: Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again, in: Boston Review. A Political and Literary Forum (29 June 2017); cited from: https://bostonreview.net/literature-culture-margaret-atwood-junot-diaz-make-margaret-atwood-fiction-again [accessed 16 Mar. 2022].
- 6.
Quoted in: How Does a 30-Year-Old Novel Become a Runaway Bestseller and Hit TV Show? Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale Rides Again, in: The Lavin Agency (26 Apr. 2017); cited from: https://www.thelavinagency.com/news/handmaids-tale-bestseller [last accessed 16 Mar. 2022].
- 7.
It is interesting to note that several webpages now advertise The Handmaid’s Tale with a statement by Bernardine Evaristo, connecting and solidarizing, in a marketing move, Atwood’s 1985 speculative fiction with an emerging fourth-wave feminist literature: »›A fantastic, chilling story. And so powerfully feminist‹, Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other«; see, for example, https://www.amazon.de/Handmaids-Tale-Vintage-Classics-English-ebook/dp/B0082BAJA0 [accessed 16 Mar. 2022]. The Handmaid’s Tale re-entered the paperback charts in 2019, where it peaked at No. 2. See Alison Flood, Jade Cuttler: Handmaid’s sales: Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments is immediate hit, in: The Guardian (17 Sept. 2019); cited from: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/17/handmaids-sales-margaret-atwoods-the-testaments-is-immediate-hit [accessed 16 Mar. 2022].
- 8.
For a detailed discussion of circulation as a key feature of literary works, see Fabio Akcelrud Durão: Circulation as Constitutive Principle, in: José Luís Jobim (ed.): Literary and Cultural Circulation, Oxford et al. 2017, 55–71. On ›circulation‹ as a structuring and aesthetic element, see also Michael Gamper’s article in the present volume.
- 9.
Italics and capitalization in the original are maintained unless stated otherwise.
- 10.
On the circulation of rumors, especially, see Elke Dubbels’s contribution.
- 11.
For another exploration of the interdependencies of literary circulation, social energy, and protest movements, see Damla Yeşil’s paper.
- 12.
All quotations from The Handmaid’s Tale are taken from Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale. With a new introduction, New York 2017. Quotations and other references to this edition are indicated by the abbreviation THT and the corresponding page number in parenthesis.
- 13.
Quotations from The Testament (subsequently abbreviated as TT) are cited according to Margaret Atwood: The Testaments, London 2019.
- 14.
Originally, Atwood intended to name the novel Offred after its protagonist and narrator. However, as Atwood explains in her new introduction to the 2017 edition, »[a]t some time during the writing, the novel’s name changed to The Handmaid’s Tale, partly in honor of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but partly also in reference to fairy tales and folktales: the story told by the central character partakes – for later or remote listeners – of the unbelievable, the fantastic, as do the stories told by those who have survived earth-shattering events.« (THT, XV).
- 15.
»Whether this is my end or a new beginning I have no way of knowing: I have given myself over into the hands of strangers, because it can’t be helped. And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light« (THT, 295).
- 16.
The Nellie J. Banks was a Canadian cod fishing schooner used as rum runner by smugglers between 1926 and 1938, but it is also the name of the ship that smuggles Agnes and Nicole out of Gilead and into Canada in TT (368 and chapter XXIV, »The Nellie J. Banks«, 375–384).
- 17.
The novel suggests that Agnes Jemima is the daughter that was forcefully taken from Offred when she was kidnapped and brought to Gilead; she is later called Aunt Victoria in TT. At the beginning of the novel, Nicole lives in Canada under the name Daisy, unaware of her real identity; as it turns out, she is the daughter Offred had in Gilead, who, in the Hulu show, is saved and brought to Canada. She later re-enters Gilead as a secret agent under the name Jade. In the following, I will mainly refer to the characters as ›Agnes‹ and ›Nicole‹.
- 18.
On this issue, see Cristina Chifane: Historiographic Metafiction Reflected in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and The Testaments (2019), in: Journal of Romanian Literary Studies 21 (2020), 1180–1190.
- 19.
Ibid., 1184.
- 20.
Anya Heise-von der Lippe: Histories of Futures Past: Dystopian Fiction and the Historical Impulse, in: Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 66/4 (2018), 411–425, here: 420.
- 21.
Ibid., 418. See also Astrid Erll, Ann Rigney (ed.): Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, Berlin 2009, 3.
- 22.
In this chapter, the Commander takes Offred to an illegal nightclub with the telling name »Jezebel’s« (a reference to the eponymous biblical figure, who has historically been associated with misogynist narratives of sexual depravity), where ›rebellious‹ women are forced into sex work as the only alternative to being deported to »the Colonies«, labor camps in highly polluted agricultural areas. Two particularly important events transpire in the chapter: Offred finds out that her friend Moira, who she thought had either escaped or died, has in fact ended up at Jezebel’s, and Serena Joy, the Commander’s wife, urges Offred to have sex with their driver Nick, because she believes the Commander to be infertile.
- 23.
Elsewhere, Offred states: »But I tell time by the moon. Lunar, not solar« (THT, 199). The frequent references to the moon in THT have been interpreted as allusions to ancient fertility goddesses and matriarchal societies. See, for example, Hilde Staels: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: Resistance through narrating, in: English Studies 76/5 (1995), 455–467, here: 462.
- 24.
As Atwood lets Pieixoto state in the »Historical Notes« of THT, the monitoring of women by other women is a feature typical of every »empire imposed by force or otherwise […]: control of the indigenous by members of their own group«. To further increase their acceptance among the captured women, the Aunts are given »names derived from commercial products available to women in the immediate pre-Gilead period, and thus familiar and reassuring to them – the names of cosmetic lines, cake mixes, frozen desserts, and even medicinal remedies« (THT, 308).
- 25.
Atwood also discussed this particular aspect in an earlier conversation with the French-Canadian writer Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, where she explained: »[I]t was also the colour worn by prisoners-of-war in Canada. Why red? Because it snowed a lot, and it was easy to spot the prisoners against the snow when they escaped. It’s also the colour of the Red Cross and the colour for wet nurses. And of course I’d read The Scarlet Letter.« Margaret Atwood, Victor-Lévy Beaulieu: Two Solicitudes: Conversations, trans. by Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott, Toronto 1998, 72.
- 26.
The proverb, often attributed to Francis Bacon or, in its most literal form, to Thomas Hobbes, is printed as a motto on the book cover of the TT hardcover edition, together with another quotation commonly associated with Mark Twain, namely »History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes« – see section III of this contribution.
- 27.
»You can do what you want to her, but you can’t kill her«, Bruce Miller was told by Atwood. Quoted in Callum Crumlish: The Handmaid’s Tale season 4: Aunt Lydia would never die as Ann Dowd reveals shock reason, in: Express (10 Sept. 2019); cited from: https://www.express.co.uk/showbiz/tv-radio/1176125/the-handmaids-tale-season-4-aunt-lydia-death-killed-the-testaments-Margaret-Atwood [accessed 16 Mar. 2022].
- 28.
Aunt Lydia’s own secret selection of »proscribed books« includes 19th-century novels with female protagonists such as Jane Eyre (1847), Anna Karenina (1878), and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), but Atwood also furnished it with fellow Canadian writer Alice Munro’s short story cycle Lives of Girls and Women (1971). On mimetic representations of book circulation in literary texts, see Shuangzhi Li’s contribution to this volume.
- 29.
Similar descriptions can be found elsewhere in the text: »The Aunts had their methods, and their informants: no walls were solid for them, no doors locked« (TT, 236); »It was how the Aunts got their power: by finding things out. Things that should never be talked about.« (TT, 286).
- 30.
One of the functions of the Bloodlines Genealogical Archives is to prevent involuntary incestuous relationships: »It’s essential to record who is related to whom, both officially and in fact: due to the Handmaid system, a couple’s child may not be biologically related to the elite mother or even to the official father, for a desperate Handmaid is likely to seek impregnation however she may. It is our business to inform ourselves, since incest must be prevented: there are enough Unbabies already. It is also the business of Ardua Hall to guard that knowledge jealously: the Archives are the beating heart of Ardua Hall.« (TT, 35).
- 31.
Lois Feuer: The Calculus of Love and Nightmare. The Handmaid’s Tale and the Dystopian Tradition, in: Critique 38/2 (1997), 83–95, here: 85. See also Heise-von der Lippe (note 19), 419.
- 32.
Atwood’s inspiration for the cod Latin phrase came from her own school days; see Amanda Howell: Breaking silence, bearing witness, and voicing defiance: the resistant female voice in the transmedial storyworld of the The Handmaid’s Tale, in: Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 33/2 (2019), 216–229, here: 216.
- 33.
See Heise-von der Lippe (note 19), 413.
- 34.
Atwood/Beaulieu (note 24), 72.
- 35.
See Nancy Lang’s and Peter Raymont’s documentary Margaret Atwood: A Word after a Word after a Word is Power, Canada 2019, 92 min, here: 33:05–33:22.
- 36.
See Atwood/Beaulieu (note 24), 76, and THT, XIII–XIV and XVI–XVIII.
- 37.
Quoted in Shirley Neuman: ›Just a Backlash‹: Margaret Atwood, Feminism, and The Handmaid’s Tale, in: University of Toronto Quarterly 75/3 (Summer 2006), 857–868, here: 858.
- 38.
The saying, often attributed to Mark Twain, is quoted on TT’s hardcover edition wrapper and, with slight variations, by Maryann Crescent Moon in the context of the novel’s metafictional framing: »As they say, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes« (TT, 407).
- 39.
On The Handmaid’s Tale as a transmedial pop culture phenomenon and its role in feminist protest culture, see Howell (note 31). In addition to Atwood’s novel and the Hulu TV show, Howell also analyzes Volker Schlöndorff’s 1990 movie adaptation.
- 40.
See, for example, Anne-Sophie Galli: Trump streicht Geld für Abtreibungen im Ausland, in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung (24 Jan. 2017); cited from: https://www.nzz.ch/international/aktuelle-themen/drittes-praesidiales-dekret-trump-streicht-geld-fuer-abtreibungen-im-ausland-ld.141526 [accessed 16 Mar. 2022].
- 41.
See Tiziana de Rogatis’s talk on »Transnational Storytelling and the Global Novel: Elena Ferrante, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Margaret Atwood«, held on the occasion of the research seminar Gender and Transnational Reception. Map** the Translation, Circulation and Recognition of Women’s Writings in the 20th and 21st Century organized by the Institute of Modern Languages Research of the University of London (26 Mar. 2021). Recordings of the event are available on the University of London’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWNcR9voclk&list=WL&index=4 [accessed 16 Mar. 2022], here: 1:13:15–1:16:17.
- 42.
See, for example, Christine Hauser: A Handmaid’s Tale of Protest, in: The New York Times (30 June 2017); cited from: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/us/handmaids-protests-abortion.html [accessed 16 Mar. 2022].
- 43.
Often, those protests involved blocking the circulation of pedestrians and vehicles, an aspect that political theorist Oliver Marchart has identified as a crucial element in the creation of public political space: »In street protest, antagonism is enacted and circulation is blocked by human bodies. The human body is the most important medium through which a public space is carved out of the social. […] we may define street protest as the collective and embodied activity of blocking streams of circulation whereby a line of conflict is drawn through social space. And it is only along such a line of conflict that a public, in the true sense of the word, emerges.« Oliver Marchart: Conflictual Aesthetics: Artistic Activism and the Public Sphere, Berlin 2019, 88.
- 44.
The movement has achieved its goal: on 14 January 2021, President Alberto Fernández signed into law a bill that legalizes abortion on demand up to the fourteenth week of pregnancy.
- 45.
See, for example, Chris Bell: How the handmaid became an international protest symbol, in: BBC News (27 July 2018); cited from: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-44965210 [accessed 16 Mar. 2022].
- 46.
Holly Black: Noma Bar’s Cover Design for The Testaments Upends Our Vision of the Handmaid, in: Elephant (26 Sept. 2019); cited from: https://elephant.art/noma-bars-cover-design-testaments-upends-vision-handmaid/ [accessed 16 Mar. 2022].
- 47.
In capitalizing all racial as well as ethnic identity markers including ›White‹, I follow, among others, Ann Thuý Nguyễn and Maya Pendleton: Recognizing Race in Language: Why We Capitalize ›Black‹ and ›White‹, in: Center for the Study of Social Policy (23 Mar. 2020); cited from: https://cssp.org/2020/03/recognizing-race-in-language-why-we-capitalize-black-and-white/ [accessed 16 Mar. 2022].
- 48.
Danita J. Dodson: ›We lived in the blank white spaces‹: Rewriting the Paradigm of Denial in Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, in: Utopian Studies 8/2 (1997), 66–86 (passim). Dodson highlights that while Offred makes use of the »slave-woman trope to tell her story« (80), the forms of oppression she suffers also make her aware of her own privileged situation both before and in Gilead (esp. 80–84). In this context, see also Dodson’s interview with the author conducted in May 1994 »on the intertwined topics of feminism, postcolonialism, and utopianism«; id.: An Interview with Margaret Atwood, in: Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 38/2 (1997), 96–104, here: 96.
- 49.
Moss’s affiliation with Scientology has caused controversial discussions as to her suitability for this specific role. See, for example, Rhian Daly: Elisabeth Moss addresses criticisms over »hypocrisy« over Scientology beliefs and starring in ›The Handmaid’s Tale‹, in: NME (9 Apr. 2019); cited from: https://www.nme.com/news/elisabeth-moss-addresses-criticisms-hypocrisy-scientology-beliefs-handmaids-tale-2474480 [accessed 16 Mar. 2022].
- 50.
Ana Cottle: ›The Handmaid’s Tale‹: A White Feminist’s Dystopia, in: Medium (17 May 2017); cited from: https://medium.com/the-establishment/the-handmaids-tale-a-white-feminist-s-dystopia-80da75a40dc5 [accessed 16 Mar. 2022]. See also Ellen E. Jones: The Handmaid’s Tale’s race problem, in: The Guardian (31 July 2017); cited from: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/jul/31/the-handmaids-tales-race-problem [accessed 16 Mar. 2022], and Noah Berlatsky: Both versions of The Handmaid’s Tale have a problem with racial erasure, in: The Verge (15 June 2017); cited from: https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/15/15808530/handmaids-tale-hulu-margaret-atwood-black-history-racial-erasure [accessed 16 Mar. 2022].
- 51.
See Oana Gheorghiu and Michaela Praisler: Rewriting Politics, or the Emerging Fourth Wave of Feminism in Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, in: ELOPE 17/1 (2020), 87–96.
- 52.
Heise-von der Lippe (note 19), 416.
- 53.
See Katie Paterson: Future Library; https://www.futurelibrary.no [accessed 16 Mar. 2022].
- 54.
Addendum in light of recent events (June 2022): In a major setback for women's rights, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. The court's highly controversial ruling has been met with sharp criticism both within the U.S. and internationally.
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Wrobel, J. (2023). Secret Tapes and Their Intra- and Extratextual Circulation Routes. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. In: Gamper, M., Müller-Tamm, J., Wachter, D., Wrobel, J. (eds) Der Wert der literarischen Zirkulation / The Value of Literary Circulation. Globalisierte Literaturen. Theorie und Geschichte transnationaler Buchkultur / Globalized Literatures. Theory and History of Transnational Book Culture, vol 3. J.B. Metzler, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-65544-3_29
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