Margaret Atwood Archive

In such ancient stories as The Odyssey, women, who are often archetypes and who typically exist in the margins, are enlivened when their stories are told by contemporary writers, freeing them from their limited roles

While many have praised the book’s feminist themes, none have noticed that the Hulu adaptation highlights Atwood’s special warning intended for women writers, historians, artists, and documentarians. In a patriarchal society turned radical and violent, a woman’s voice will be stifled by taking away the written word.

Future Home of the Living God has been hailed as the heir to Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, mostly because it talks about women forced to carry out pregnancies and dystopian political repression. Those two ideas together, however, are nothing new.

Apocalypse narratives so often focus on isolation—a person up against a wasteland or navigating groups of raiding cannibals—but what happens to the communities in these situations and what do the stories made from them show about the ebb and flow of disasters that weigh on any community.

The Handmaid’s Tale is a look at the importance of the rules which we live by, at the frightening possibilities of a world in which fanatics decide our fate. And that warning remains timeless.