As the inspiration for the television hit ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, Margaret Atwood’s writing remains eerily prophetic.
Her work has often had its finger on the pulse of power. Her prescience is part imaginative projection and part attention to history and political trends.
The sixth and final season of the original Hulu show, which ends this week, has drawn from Atwood’s politics even as it departs from her ‘Handmaid’s follow-up, ‘The Testaments’.
Both Atwood’s book and the series have reflected currents of political turmoil, in particular rising authoritarianism in the United States as well as the erosion of women’s rights south of the border.
These real-life trends also raise questions about the debts humans owe to one another, a common Atwood theme.
What will we do about what we see?
Atwood has said that: “In ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, nothing happens that the human race has not already done at some time in the past, or which it is not doing now, perhaps in other countries, or for which it has not yet developed the technology.”
There’s a similar theme at the end of Atwood’s ‘Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth’ when she re-imagines “Scrooge Nouveau,” adapted from Charles Dickens’ original character.
Visited by different spirits as penance for his greed, Scrooge Nouveau is shown a news article from the 1970s. In it, analysts predicted the collapse of the world economy in 2042, alongside “widespread pestilence, poverty and starvation.”
While Atwood’s retelling of Dickens’s story is fictional, the prediction is real.
In ‘Payback’, the article Scrooge Nouveau sees references data collected in ‘The Limits of Growth’, a 1972 study out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that used predictive modeling to anticipate humankind’s future.
Scrooge Nouveau is outraged because people knew and did nothing. When he visits an implied 2040s future with a giant cockroach figure of “the Spirit of Earth Day Future,” he sees two options: a world thriving on a permaculture model of sustainability versus himself with a wheelbarrow of money, starving to death, as he witnesses “a moment of hyperinflation.”
We know. We can see a potential future unfolding before our eyes.
When Atwood reads the figurative palm of power to interpret the future, she’s reading where the lines of history lead. Her question for us might be: “What will we do?”
Current U.S. rhetoric, paired with challenges to bodily autonomy and rising global warnings about neo-fascism, beg questions about how we understand society’s interconnectedness, across eras and across communities, how we can trust each other and how this will inform our sense of responding to what’s “right.”
‘Notes on Power Politics’
In the ‘Handmaid’s’ series, wealth is hoarded as trust erodes and bodies are turned into objects and things. In her 1973 essay “Notes on Power Politics,” Atwood wrote that “from the point of power that is what we are: things, objects, the manipulated.”
Survival in this ideological framework depends on how and with whom one co-operates. Atwood calls survival, or “la Survivance,” a “multi-faceted and adaptable idea.”
It means “carving out a place and a way of keeping alive” and surviving in the face of disaster or crisis. Survival is communal because of the ways we become indebted to and rely on others for how we stay alive.
As the ‘Handmaid’s’ show ends, a new spotlight is shining on the theme of resistance against the backdrop of protagonist June’s perpetual, seemingly hopeless re-entry into Gilead, the theocratic dictatorship established when a military coup overthrew the U.S. government.
The debt she feels towards her kidnapped young daughter, Hannah, motivates the story’s narrative arc of redemption and survival in the face of insurmountable odds. This links back to how the crux of both the series and Atwood’s novel hinge on power — who has it, who gets it, how one takes it and at what cost. While the commanders feel that power is their due, other debts in terms of rights and freedoms bring their society to a breaking point.
Ongoing conversation about trust
The ongoing conversation about trust — who can you trust, when, in what circumstances, and how much that trust is worth — continues to challenge how democracy relies on faith or confidence for certain political systems to work. What might be missing in Gilead is the promise of reciprocation or a relational binding as part of a community.
Instead, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ series builds reciprocation, as a form of indebtedness, into the relationships the handmaids have with each other and their wider connections with friends and family.
They embody Atwood’s axioms on debt, survival and resistance: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum, the novel’s and series’ theme of “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
The resistance survives because the spirit of indebtedness outweighs the belief in money and power; in other words, a faith in objects creates no feelings of reciprocity.
If the foreshadowing in this seasons’s episodes “Exodus” and “Execution” tell viewers anything, it’s that fighting for beliefs based on trust, “paying back” and “paying forward,” will always lead to what’s right in the end.
