Among the literary portraits of American fascism garnering renewed interest since last November, Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale is probably the best known. Indeed, its nightmare of reproductive injustice is so familiar that signs at the Women's March earlier this year could simply allude to it, with slogans like "Make Margaret Atwood fiction again" or "Nolite te bastardes carborundorum" (also a popular tattoo). Activists in Texas recently protested proposed further restrictions on abortion access by dressing as Handmaids.
The novel has been variously banned, translated, and adapted, including multiple dramatic adaptations for radio and stage, a ballet, an opera, a 1990 feature film, and most recently, a ten-episode series on Hulu.
The Handmaid's Tale describes a near-future American theocracy in which environmental pollution has led to widespread infertility. The patriarchal regime that takes over portions of the United States and renames it Gilead imposes a totalizing system that dictates clothing, ritual, and family structure: the few women who are still fertile are assigned as 'Handmaids' to the families of powerful Commanders.
Publicity for the series has stressed its timeliness while acknowledging its updating. But while many of the inevitable changes from the book work well, displacing and condensing elements for clarity and visual impact, dramatizing moments unrepresented in the novel, and elaborating on the experiences of secondary characters, one problematic change has been evident since the previews revealed the protagonist's friend Moira is played by Samira Wiley, best known from Orange is the New Black. The attempt to make the setting post-racial runs counter to the political history of the United States, the details of the novel, and the ostensible goals of the change.
Among the small number of writers to critique this choice, I'm drawing here on points from Susan Rensing on Nursing Clio, Soraya McDonald on The Undefeated, Priya Nair in Bitch Magazine, Jane Hu in the Los Angeles Review of Books, and blog posts on Fangs for the Fantasy and by Ambereen Dadabhoy.
In the novel, the Gilead theocracy is racist as well as sexist and homophobic. The excuse for the imposition of martial law that leads to the Gilead takeover is a supposed threat of Islamic terrorism. African Americans are relocated to the Midwest, to homelands imagined as resembling those of apartheid era south Africa. Dissidents of various sorts are either executed—their hanged bodies often displayed for days as a warning to others—or are sent to clean up the toxic wastelands known as the Colonies, apparently a slightly slower sort of death sentence.
But only white women become handmaids.
Some critics have faulted the novel for this. The book gets some of its frisson from imposing on white women some of the oppressions imposed on enslaved Black women in the antebellum South and the tropes and imagery of US chattel slavery: Women in Gilead are forbidden to read, write, or congregate. They are treated as property, valued for their reproductive capacity, and named for their owners—the central character is called Offred because her commander is named Fred. Those escaping to Canada are helped by a secret network known as the Underground Femaleroad, and many of their allies are Quakers. Offred's narrative, like many 19th century slave narratives, originates in oral form.
But while Atwood's novel thus arguably obscures the intricate relation of racism and sexism by silently transposing races, centering a white woman's experience by taking what happened to African American women under slavery and imagining a near future where white women experience forced breeding, the book does acknowledge the racism of Gilead. In the far-future epilogue, an historian looking back at Gilead notes that the regime's “racist policies … were firmly rooted in the pre-Gilead period, and racist fears provided some of the emotional fuel that allowed the Gilead takeover to succeed as well as it did."
For the Hulu series, however, executive producer Bruce Miller decided to cut out the white supremacist ideology of the Republic of Gilead, saying that he "made the decision that fertility trumped everything."
But of course concerns over the birthrate and population have always been about whose fertility and the fear of being overrun by someone else’s babies. The religious right first got traction as a political movement not in trying to stop abortions but in trying to stop racial integration. White supremacist groups worry that interracial marriage constitutes "white genocide" because it taints Aryan purity. Stormfront and similar sites fret about whites being outbred by non-whites, and the "Quiverfull" movement encourages Christian white women to breed incessantly.
The reaction of an oppressive, White Straight Male, religious patriarchal society to a fertility crisis is most certainly not going to be “let’s breed more Black/Latino/Asian babies!”. The womb wars are a very real thing among this movement - outbreeding the “other” is a campaign for them. These people are not going to see a declining birth rate and think “all of humanity is in peril, come people of all races unite in joint purpose to produce multi-racial babies by the score!”. They’re going to see a decline in White babies and panic.
So the change is implausible in relation to real history.
It also works badly in relation to Gilead rituals, as Soraya McDonald points out.
When a pregnancy results in a birth, there’s a special chair devised for Wives and handmaids once a handmaid goes into labor, one that positions the handmaid (rather uncomfortably) below the wife and between her legs. Wives are encouraged to experience birth days as if it is they who are going through labor to deliver a child.
All of this serves to reinforce the idea that the handmaids are merely ambulatory wombs. They serve one purpose, which is to pop out babies, then give them up as soon as they’re weaned. And so introducing the idea of nonwhite handmaids prompts a question: What happens when a black woman gives birth to an interracial baby who serves as a daily reminder to a Wife that she’s not the child’s biological mother when so many rules and ceremonies have been created to obscure that very reality?
Moreover, the producer's attempt to suggest that this is a post-racial world is implausible.
As Jane Hu asks in the LA Review of Books,
where are all the Asian handmaids? Given the show’s rhetoric of concubines and its reflection on outsourced female labor and reproductive carework, postracial America is strangely devoid of any Asian women.
If this were truly a world devoid of white supremacy, would all of the wives of the commanders be icy blondes or pale gingers? We have only to look at the ruling elites to know that this is a mere fiction or palliative for those of us who demand some form of diversity from the entertainment we consume.
Compounding this is the fact that other than Moira, the other black and brown bodies are both scarce and light-skinned.
....In fact, if “fertility [did] trump everything,” then I suspect that we would see a lot more brown people than we do. It’s not as though there is evidence that white women are more fertile than others. At the very least we would see equal distribution of races within the ranks of the handmaids. Finally, the lingering and loving gaze of the camera lets us know how much the narrative is invested in white suffering and white pain. We are treated to long close-ups of delicate white faces forced to wince and blink at unspeakable atrocities. It is their pain we are asked to witness and with which we should identify.
Compounding this is the fact that other than Moira, the other black and brown bodies are both scarce and light-skinned.
....In fact, if “fertility [did] trump everything,” then I suspect that we would see a lot more brown people than we do. It’s not as though there is evidence that white women are more fertile than others. At the very least we would see equal distribution of races within the ranks of the handmaids. Finally, the lingering and loving gaze of the camera lets us know how much the narrative is invested in white suffering and white pain. We are treated to long close-ups of delicate white faces forced to wince and blink at unspeakable atrocities. It is their pain we are asked to witness and with which we should identify.
We are asked to identify with the suffering of these women on a fundamental level, on a universal level, and on a human level.
In trying to rationalize the series' casting choices, producer Miller asks,
What’s the difference between making a TV show about racists and making a racist TV show? Why would we be covering [the story of handmaid Offred...], rather than telling the story of the people of color who got sent off to [the Midwest]?
But surely there is potentially a great deal of difference between making a TV show about racists and making a racist TV show, and the possibility that Miller presents this as a rhetorical question should cause concern. In the terms Miller tries to set up, there is indeed no good reason that Offred herself need be played by a white woman. Moreover, since we've begun to see the series develop scenes and characters not followed in the novel, there is no good reason we would not follow those who were exiled to some homeland.
In short, the series effects a denial of the continuing significance of white supremacy.
In short, the series effects a denial of the continuing significance of white supremacy.
