In a powerful conversation for the Service95 Book Club, Dua Lipa sits down with the icon that is Margaret Atwood to discuss The Handmaid’s Tale – her enduring novel set in a dystopian society where women are stripped of their rights and forced into reproductive servitude. Through the eyes of Offred, a Handmaid, the novel explores themes of power, control, and resistance.
Published in 1985, The Handmaid’s Tale has only grown more relevant in the decades since. “When I wrote it, it was 1985. The Cold War was still on. The Berlin Wall was still up, and I was working on The Handmaid’s Tale in West Berlin,” Margaret tells Dua. “I also visited East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Poland – all part of the East Bloc at that time.” The oppressive surveillance state and constrained freedoms she witnessed during that time helped shape the world of Gilead, where the novel is set.
In her new memoir, Book Of Lives, which Dua read alongside The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret describes the latter as having three origin stories – political, literary and historical. The political backdrop of the early 1980s was essential. “That was the beginning of the rise of the so-called religious right as a political force,” she says. “What they were saying specifically about women was that they belonged in the home. Their proper role was just that – and only that.”
From this context, Gilead took shape – a society where fertile women are separated from their families and assigned to commanders for the purpose of reproduction. “I put nothing into this book that hadn’t been done by someone, sometime, somewhere,” Margaret explains.
“I put nothing into this book that hadn’t been done by someone, sometime, somewhere”
Margaret Atwood
The novel is narrated by Offred – a woman whose very name signals possession. “I was looking at the European patronymic systems,” Margaret says. “So I just wrote the word ‘of,’ which is the equivalent of ‘de’ or ‘von,’ and then I wrote a number of men’s names. Offred was the one that stuck.”
But The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t purely political – it’s also deeply literary. Margaret was inspired by the dystopian fiction she read as a teenager in the 1950s. “I read Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell at an impressionable age...” There’s a moment in the book when the main character, Winston Smith, betrays his lover to save himself: “He says, ‘Do it to Julia, not me.’ That became an expression in our household. So I thought, what would it be like to write a story like that from Julia’s point of view?”
Another thread comes from 17th-century Puritan New England – a society Margaret studied in depth. “The Massachusetts Bay Colony was essentially a Puritan theocracy,” she explains. “You weren’t anyone unless you were a full member of the church.” She became fascinated by the infamous Salem witch trials, and the way fear and repression operated. “When people get angry and afraid, there has to be somebody to blame,” she says. “The 17th century did it to witches. The United States is doing that now – to immigrants and various other people.”
As our political reality continues to shift, Margaret resists easy predictions about the future. “You can’t know your legacy,” she says. “Because you don’t know how the context is going to change.”
Watch Dua’s full interview with Margaret Atwood here, or listen to it via the Service95 Book Club podcast here.
There’s More – Delve Deeper Into The Handmaid’s Tale With The Service95 Book Club...
- BOOKMARK the novels that inspired Margaret Atwood’s vision
- DISCOVER what to read next from Margaret’s back catalogue
- LISTEN to The Handmaid’s Tale playlist, curated by Margaret
- READ Dua’s essay on what reading The Handmaid’s Tale taught her about the world
- EXPLORE what The Handmaid’s Tale tells us about women’s rights today
- MEET the costume designer who brought Gilead to life for the screen
