Margaret Atwood wrote the book longhand.Ģ019 Glamour Women Of The Year Award / Theo Wargo/GettyImages “I experienced the wariness, the feeling of being spied on, the silences, the changes of subject, the oblique ways in which people might convey information, and these had an influence on what I was writing,” Atwood recalled. It was during this time, and through her visits to several other Iron Curtain countries, that the Republic of Gilead began to take shape. “I was living in West Berlin, which was still encircled by the Berlin Wall,” Atwood wrote in The New York Times. The book’s oppressive themes were partly inspired by the fact that Atwood began writing it while she was living in Germany in 1984, at the height of the Cold War. Officially, The Handmaid’s Tale is set at some point in the not-too-distant future (from whenever you’re reading it). The Handmaid’s Tale was partially inspired by Cold War Germany. Even if you’ve binge-watched the Emmy Award-winning TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, there’s still much to be learned from, and about, the book. The novel follows one such handmaid, Offred, as she struggles to acclimate to (and, perhaps, to resist) her new reality. Because so few women in the Republic of Gilead are fertile, “handmaids” are enlisted to bear the children of the ruling class. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale is set in a discomfortingly familiar future, where a newly installed theocracy has instituted a sweeping series of misogynistic laws and practices.
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