The Handmaid’s Tale (Season 1, 2017). Created by Bruce Miller, based on the 1985 novel of the same name by Margaret Atwood

One of the reasons why television has been influential in challenging received notions about reproduction, sex and sexuality, and ‘the family’ (broadly defined) is its fairground halls of mirrors-style ability to show viewers their lives at a productive remove. When I was growing up in 1990s England, television (watched, of course, on television sets) was a cozy, yet intermittently controversial, medium. Its literal situation in the midst of families broke taboos and began conversations. Many column inches were given over to whether or not particular series, episodes, and storylines were suitable for screening before the 9pm ‘watershed’, after which time content was deemed to be ‘too grown up’ for children.

British soap operas’ grit sliced through their clichéd pre-credits, lingering-gazed cliffhangers and theme tunes recognizable to those who watched them, and to those who did not. Soap operas were often productively controversial in their portrayals of what were, problematically in retrospect, cast as ‘issues’: ‘the lesbian kiss’ in Brookside (1994) and a central character living with HIV in Eastenders (from the early 1990s onwards). The tendency for soap operas to follow families and households over quite long periods of time arguably made it easier to empathize with the characters depicted. Many soap operas, but perhaps most markedly the longest running and most viewed – Coronation Street (which began in 1960) and Eastenders (first broadcast in 1985 – focused on the extraordinary everyday lives of working-class and lower-middle-class people. They explored state politics’ bearing upon family life and reproduction. After all, these political epochs included Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s ‘there is no such thing as society’ era (important context for Marilyn Strathern’s After Nature) and Section 28, which forbade the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in schools, and John Major’s 1993 ‘Back to Basics’ campaign, which called for ‘respect for the family, and respect for the law’ and was often experienced as a kick in the teeth to 'non-traditional' families such as those headed by single mothers.

I write about British soap operas here because they embody the idea that television can be both deadly serious and entertaining, relaxing even. It is striking, then, that I can’t have been the only one to put off watching Bruce Miller’s 2017 television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale. This was despite the series’ critical acclaim and the popularity of Atwood and her novel. Indeed, a great deal of the media inspired by The Handmaid’s Tale has pushed to the limit the feeling that fiction, whatever its medium, is both ‘good to think with’ and a leisure activity.

In the near future, the Republic of Gilead – a fundamentalist Christian totalitarian government – has seized power in the North-East of the United States. We know that this is the near future, because carefully chosen details show that the ‘before’ is close to the viewers’ present: salted caramel ice cream, jogging with Apple products, disbelief at just how bad things are getting, coupled with little feeling of being able to afford change.

The central character, played by Mad Men actor Elizabeth Moss, is the titular handmaid and her narrative laces between her life in the Gilead and before it. Her real name is June but she is called ‘Offred’ because, under Gilead, she belongs to a man called Fred. If this violent naming sounds familiar then it should, because it says something important about how Atwood conceived of The Handmaid’s Tale: many of the atrocities perpetuated by Gilead are to be found in the historical record, in this case the allocation of slave names. Much has been made of The Handmaid’s Tale being speculative fiction rather than, as it had been labelled incorrectly, science fiction. While science fiction might dream up technologies that have not been realized and perhaps never will be, speculative fiction uses existing technologies. The thing about technology, we are reminded, is that it can be a matter of cutting-edge innovation, but what is often more significant about it is that it constitutes the use of knowledge to accomplish our aims (sometimes to the detriment of others).

Before Gilead, June works in publishing and lives with her husband, Luke, and her daughter, Hannah. She has a close friend from university, Moira. June is both an ‘everywoman’ and unarguably privileged. The ten-part series uncovers in a non-linear manner her life’s complete cataclysm in only the time it takes for her hair to grow from a bob to halfway down her back. Women’s rights are eroded. We are shocked for June when economic disempowerment reveals itself through what are at first sight depressingly recognisable acts of ‘everyday misogyny’. June’s card is declined at a coffee shop and the barista responds to her frustrated attempts to work out what has gone awry by calling her a ‘slut’. Neither the viewer nor June know if this is an isolated attack or a symptom of something more systematic.

The makers and cast of The Handmaid’s Tale have been criticized for their reluctance to explicitly unpack the programme’s feminist significance. Moss, when interviewed at the Tribeca Film Festival, controversially said ‘For me, it’s not a feminist story. It’s a human story because women’s rights are human rights’ (she subsequently stated otherwise, see Mulkerrins, 2017). What is at stake are the ideas that reproduction specifically can be used as a violent tool of statecraft and that women, constructed as a category of people who can bear children, are so powerful that they cannot be trusted to control either their own lives or those of actual or imagined children.

Part of the context of Gilead is a demographic crisis caused by sexually transmitted infection and environmental catastrophe. Fertile women are captured (June as she tries to escape to Canada) and forced to become ‘handmaids’. Forcefully assigned to Commander Fred Montague and his wife Serena Joy, June/Offred endures a monthly ritual rape aimed at conception called ‘the Ceremony’. The Ceremony is a fundamentalist reading – and enactment – of a passage from the Bible (Genesis 30:1-3). Aunt Lydia, a woman who trains the handmaids explains, "‘When Rachel saw that she bore Jacob no children, she said unto Jacob, ‘Give me children, or else I die.’ And Rachel said, ‘Behold my maid Bilhah. Go in, unto her. And she shall bear upon my knees, that I may have children by her.’” Offred must take a bath and then lie with her head between Serena Montague’s legs (‘bearing upon [her] knees’) while the rape is perpetrated so that they become ‘one flesh’. She must wear her floor-length red smock and rough thorn-coloured socks, plus the Puritan-style bonnet throughout the Ceremony because in Gilead-thought this shows that the Commander is acting not out of sexual desire but in the name of procreation.

The premise for the Ceremony is that Serena Joy is ‘barren’, but who can say if this is actually why the Montagues have not been able to have children, because male infertility does not exist according to Gilead. (There is, of course, nothing dystopian about popular assumptions that heterosexual couples who have problems conceiving do so because of the woman’s fertility. This short-sightedness puts pressure on women and stops men from seeking either support or medical help [see Inhorn, 2004].)

The oppression of women under Gilead reaches its apogee in the Ceremony because rape is a kind of accelerated and intensified distillation of the everyday workings of the regime. Handmaids are supposed to value their position or, at least act as if they do, and the main way Gilead works towards this is by robbing them of all other aspects of their personhood so that only fertility remains. They lose family and children, names, property, freedom of speech (including even ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’). Because they are being watched by state militia called ‘Eyes’, handmaids are in serious danger if they talk to each other about topics other than shopping and the weather. The breakdown of relationships of all sorts under Gilead is conveyed by very few sentences of more than a few words being spoken by any character. No one has conversations. Bible passages are uttered. Notes are passed (at great risk). Bulletproof vans’ passengers duck from sight as they pass checkpoints. The correct response to armed state militia’s demands to know ‘what is going on’ is always ‘nothing’. Women are, at least in theory, made to feel ashamed of themselves and too scared and mistrustful to support or advocate for one other. Prior to being assigned to couples without children, the handmaids are made to sit in a circle around one of their number and follow her recounting of being raped by a group of men with the chant ‘it was your fault!’

Separation and division are central themes of The Handmaid’s Tale because so much dramatic tension is drawn from the question of whether or not June/Offred will see her loved ones again and because of the carving up of women into classes based on their use to men: ‘wives’ (social respectability under a theonomic state), ‘handmaids’ (reproduction), ‘Marthas’ (cooking and other domestic labour), ‘Jezebels’ (sex in brothels and sometimes, subversively in the context of Gilead, conversation).

Social science research has also revealed separation and division as themes that resonate with certain ideas about assisted reproductive technology (ART), especially surrogacy. It seems important to say that The Handmaid’s Tale is, however, not about surrogacy. Even aside from the rape used with the aim of making babies in the novel and television series, the surrogacy that Offred and her ‘colleagues’ face is not chosen by the surrogate, nor are her rights protected by law. Also, the traditional surrogacy portrayed in The Handmaid’s Tale, in which both the surrogate’s egg and her womb are used is much less common than gestational surrogacy, where a fertilized egg from the woman seen as ‘the biological mother’ is implanted in the surrogate’s womb. What is pertinent, however, are the meeting points between the speculative horror in The Handmaid’s Tale and certain aspects of research on ‘parenting culture’ (see Lee et al., 2014) on the one hand and anxieties about surrogacy and ‘the maternal bond’ (Dow, 2017) on the other.

Cognitive dissonance is implanted in viewers by placing the common and emotive state of wishing for a pregnancy in as sadistic a character as Serena Joy, who is after all, keeping a slave. Aside from this, and also quite divorced from the well-documented moral panic about ‘designer babies’ that has surrounded ART at various points, as a work of speculative fiction what is interesting is the power of comparatively cheap and uncontroversial material cultures of reproduction. Consider the home pregnancy test: this is surely never an uncomplicated artefact given that either of its possible outcomes can give rise to joy, relief, disbelief, anxiety, or fear. But it assumes a novel significance in The Handmaid’s Tale as Serena Joy, having spent month after month enquiring about Offred’s period, violently forces her to take a test. Serena prays while waiting for a 'positive' cross to appear, rather than a 'negative' line. When it does not, her cruelty towards enslaved Offred continues but we can observe her mindfulness that she needs Offred to be relatively well if she is to get ‘her’ baby. (The Montagues’ previous handmaid killed herself). Here the programme makers have subverted tropes from parenting culture. Looking at a positive home pregnancy test – in films, television, and advertising – is a mainstream media ‘kinship moment’ comparable to marriage proposals and ‘finding the right dress’: much desired by some people, infinitely commercialized, often gendered.

The series also comments on how certain aspects of bourgeois parenting culture (but here, really just motherhood) are strikingly given to performance. Serena wants to become a mother but, seeing her more ambivalent friends, it could just as easily have been the case that she has to perform wanting a child in order to fulfill her role as a wife. Even when genuinely pleased with Offred’s pregnancy, Serena recites banalities that seem to jar with her personality, performing impending motherhood in a sing-song fashion while passive aggressively (but perhaps just aggressively) keeping Offred in her place by making sure she eats well – less for herself than for the baby: ‘You need to be in the clean plate club’.

A particularly memorable episode sees Serena Joy and her friends, all ‘wives’ of course, surround a woman performing a sort of sympathetic labour simultaneously as her surrogate actually gives birth. This may be in part a comment on the potency of childbirth as a ubiquitous symbol and one that lends itself to mimicry and, indeed, compelling television. Both women pant while their female friends gather around them offering words of support. Their experiences diverge because of the class-based differences accentuated by the wife’s sumptuous blue (to evoke the Virgin Mary) quarters and the handmaid’s fittingly functional room. There are historical precedents of the work of motherhood being ‘split’ in various ways between women, such as through wet nurses and nannies (see Dow, 2017 citing Drummond, 1978). That, in The Handmaid’s Tale, wives mimic the labour of the handmaid by ‘going into labour’ expresses a rather different dynamic. The commonality is that, given the privileged positions of both the women who had such help historically and the fictional women depicted in the programme reviewed here, women in less powerful positions (not that there is an equivalence between working-class women who might have been nannies and slaves) help reproduce the social classes that oppress them.

Offred and viewers alike worry (with good reason, it turns out) about how Janine/Ofwarren, the woman who has just given birth, will cope with giving up ‘her’ baby. The idea that a woman will face a great deal of hardship when saying goodbye to a baby whom she has gestated is the hypothetical ‘nightmare scenario’ that the very thought of surrogacy evokes for some (see Dow, 2017). Janine ‘suffers’ from her attachment to ‘her baby’. The baby is taken away after birth and is returned to her only for breastfeeding. Here she sings lovingly to the infant, an act interpreted as a sign of emotional attachment in contrast to the provision of ‘just biological’ nourishment. Most worryingly, she has secretly named the baby, which suggests she has power over the baby and, according to some ideas about what naming means, feels that she knows ‘what sort of person’ the girl will grow up to be. That Janine/Ofwarren has apparently fallen in love with the man who has imprisoned her also resonates with a further anxiety about arrangements for having babies made between people who are not partners. Because popular culture expects a mother to love her child, and discourses that present a narrow idea of what it is to be a parent portray that she should also love the person with whom she is having a child, in a dystopia, the woman is not allowed to feel or express love for either.

The point here is that surrogacy only works if it is taken in good faith that the woman who gestates and gives birth to the baby has chosen to do so and knows the ramifications of what she is doing. The actuality that, in The Handmaid’s Tale, this is never the case, changes everything. I write this even though ‘choice’ is a notoriously complex topic in the context of reproductive politics and feminist thought. This is particularly the case as it pertains to class politics and globalization: as critics of international surrogacy in particular have asked, how does once parse the rights of a woman who is to become a surrogate with the actuality that economic pressure may be a key motivating factor in such an arrangement? How, in turn, do certain critiques of such concerns display and reinforce notions that the role of women, in reproduction and beyond, is to dwell not in a place of money but – quite separate from it – in a place of love? (cf. Dow, 2016).

The horrible world created by Atwood and translated by the commissioning company Hulu into the television series is not, it seems to me, a comment on surrogacy (either gestational or ‘traditional’) but on political violence. People who are suspected of resisting Gilead are shot in the street. Others are hung for being LGBTQ, Catholic, Jewish, or for administering abortions. What is at stake is the fragility of bodies and their amenability to being destroyed by – and also to perpetrating – unthinkable violence, especially when in possession of weapons. At the same time, bodies emerge as strangely resilient. Both Offred’s husband and her best friend are refugees. They face harrowing journeys to Canada and, in addition to being pursued by the Gilead, endure extreme cold, injury (including gunshot wounds), thirst, and hunger. In Canada, they are relieved to be alive but wonder who they are without friends and family. The place they called home, the USA, has by and large ceased to exist.