With the return of The Handmaid’s Tale to TV screens next month – the sixth and final series begins on May 3 – fans will be clamouring to find out what happens to June Osborne, the handmaid formerly known as Offred, played by Elizabeth Moss, following her desperate escape from the fictional theocratic authoritarian regime of Gilead.
Fans have followed Offred’s survival and desperation to be reunited with her eldest daughter Hannah and young baby Nichole, both of whom were stolen by Gilead.
While the sixth season has already launched in the US, over here British fans have to wait until May 3 to watch it on Amazon Prime Video.
In its official synopsis, American distributor Hulu has said that June’s “unyielding spirit and determination pull her back into the fight to take down Gilead. Luke and Moira join the resistance. Serena tries to reform Gilead while Commander Lawrence and Aunt Lydia reckon with what they have wrought, and Nick faces challenging tests of character.
“This final chapter of June’s journey highlights the importance of hope, courage, solidarity, and resilience in the pursuit of justice and freedom.”
The TV version of the book, originally published in 1985, has been a smash hit on both sides of the pond, following the stories of women – branded ‘Handmaids’ – who are forced to birth and give up their children to hardline ultra-Christian couples known as Commanders and their Wives.
Author Margaret Atwood, now 85, has long stated that there was nothing in her book that hadn’t already happened to women throughout history.
The book’s title is borrowed from the Bible’s Old Testament: slaves Bilhah, Zilpah and Hagar, known as handmaids, are given to ‘godly’ men to bear children on behalf of their infertile wives.
In 2019, Atwood visited her own archives at the University of Toronto and rediscovered the newspaper clippings and notes she had jotted down while researching for her novel.
“There was no Internet then, you couldn’t just go online and [search for] a topic, so this is just stuff I came across when reading newspapers and magazines,” she said at the time.
“I cut things out and put them in a box. I already knew what I was writing about and this was back-up. In case someone said, ‘How did you make this up?’ As I’ve said about a million times, I didn’t make it up. This is the proof – everything in these boxes.”
One of Atwood’s inspirations was Romania’s communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, who in 1966 passed draconian legislation to increase the country’s population.
Decree 770 restricted abortion to just a handful of cases and banned contraception outright in an attempt to reverse the declining birth rate.
Under Ceaușescu’s oppressive regime, all women of childbearing age were monitored and sometimes subjected to invasive medical checkups in police presence. Informants were recruited to spy on women, reporting their findings to the extensive secret police network, and every pregnancy was monitored until birth.
Divorce – as happens in the Handmaid’s Tale book – was targeted by the government too, with new measures passed to ensure marriages could only be dissolved in exceptional circumstances.
Ceaușescu’s Communist Party, which had wanted to grow the population of Romania from 20 million to 30 million, got what it wanted: an enormous baby boom in 1967 and 1968, and the total fertility rate – the average number of children born to women – swelled from 1.9 to 3.7.
But the consequences were dire. At least 10,000 women and girls died as a result of getting an illegal abortion, which was often unsafe and unsanitary, while the mortality rate of pregnant women became the highest in Europe.
The huge population increase also meant more children became malnourished, suffered from severe disabilities or ended up in the notorious orphanages because their parents could no longer afford to keep them at home.
The orphanages received global attention after the brutal fall of Ceaușescu in 1989, when Western media were allowed in. Some 500,000 children had been raised in orphanages, often neglected, tied to their beds or drugged to keep them compliant.
Many were infected by HIV thanks to the widespread use of unsterilised medical equipment, and some were subjected to physical and sexual abuse.
Atwood also borrowed from Nazi Germany’s Lebensborn movement for her book, in which ‘Aryan’ women – blonde-haired, blue-eyed and white – were given to SS officers to create ‘racially pure’ children, as part of Adolf Hitler’s obsession with eugenics and making Germany’s super-race.
Lebensborn birth houses were set up in German-occupied territories for unmarried ‘Aryan’ mothers to give birth comfortably, rather than seeking an abortion. Their children were then seized by the Nazi programme and placed with appropriate, ‘racially pure’ German families.
Thousands of foreign children, who the Nazis believed were ethnically German, were also kidnapped from their families in east and south-east Europe and ‘repatriated’ to the Third Reich, where their foster parents were told they had been orphaned.
Some were even stolen from their parents because they had the ‘appropriate’ racial features of an Aryan child.
“Totalitarianism always has views on who shall be allowed to have babies and what shall be done with the babies,” said Atwood in 2017.
“Hitler stole his children, blonde ones, hoping that he could turn them into blonde Germans. It’s been going on for a really long time.”
In Atwood’s dystopian near-future, women fear being sent to The Colonies, toxic wastegrounds where radioactive materials have been dumped, if they do not obey the harsh regime.
This punishment was based on the real-life policies of the Soviet Union, which sent prisoners to uranium mines in the 1970s to collect the material needed for its atomic bombs.
The radiation levels were so high that the average lifespan of a prisoner sent to the mines was just two years.
The Iranian Revolution in 1979 also served as inspiration for the events of Gilead, which is formed after a violent military coup by the religious fanatic Sons of Jacob. In the book and TV series, the US Constitution is suspended after the president and most of Congress are assassinated, and women’s rights are stripped away instantly.
Similarly, the Islamic Republic in Iran, under Ayatollah Khomeini, seized power in 1979 and established an oppressive regime for women, including a mandatory Islamic dress code, barring them from certain occupations and lowering the marriage age for girls from 18 to nine.
And America’s own Puritanical 17th-century history inspired several parts of Atwood’s book, including the garb for handmaids and Gilead’s network of spies and informants known as ‘Eyes’, a nod to the hysteria of the Salem witch trials.
“America was not initially founded as an 18th-century enlightenment republic. It was initially a 17th-century theocracy,” said the author in 2016 in a warning about Donald Trump’s first presidential term. “That tendency keeps bubbling up in America from time to time.”
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