{"id":38703,"date":"2017-05-28T03:00:18","date_gmt":"2017-05-28T07:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=38703"},"modified":"2017-05-27T08:38:18","modified_gmt":"2017-05-27T12:38:18","slug":"the-handmaids-tale-is-indeed-timely-but-not-the-way-they-mean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/05\/28\/the-handmaids-tale-is-indeed-timely-but-not-the-way-they-mean\/","title":{"rendered":"The Handmaid’s Tale<\/em>, is indeed timely, but not the way they mean"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the Los Angeles Times<\/em> earlier this month, Charlotte Allen<\/a> discusses the “timeliness” of Hulu’s TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale<\/em>:<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve lost count of the articles I\u2019ve read about Hulu\u2019s adaptation of Margaret Atwood\u2019s 1985 novel The Handmaid\u2019s Tale<\/em> that used the word \u201ctimely.\u201d Timely, that is, in the sense of the presidency of Donald Trump. Here\u2019s just a short list of print and online outlets where the T-word appears in connection with the re-creation of Atwood\u2019s fictional America turned into a grim theocracy called Gilead that treats women like breeding cattle: the Hollywood Reporter<\/em>, the Washington Post<\/em>, the Guardian<\/em>, Mother Jones<\/em>, Harper\u2019s Bazaar<\/em>, the Daily Beast<\/em>, Bustle<\/em>, NPR, and CNN. The 77-year-old Atwood herself chimed in, telling the Los Angeles Times<\/em>\u2019 Patt Morrison: \u201cWe\u2019re no longer making fiction \u2014 we\u2019re making a documentary.\u201d<\/p>\n

The idea, in these mostly liberal media outlets, seems to be that under President Trump, America has become \u2014 or will become terrifyingly soon \u2014 a militant Bible-based patriarchy (hello Texas, hello Mike Pence) in which women have no rights, especially no reproductive rights, and are divided into rigidly stratified social classes whose very names give their status away: privileged, churchy Wives at the top, Econowives in the lower social orders, and cook-and-bottle-washer Marthas who do the housework for the Wives and their powerful husbands, the Commanders.<\/p>\n

At the very bottom are Handmaids, political pariahs (wrong ideas, such as feminism) who become the literal property of the top-dog men and are forced to bear their children. (The Wives suffer from environmental pollution-related fertility problems.) As the New Republic\u2019s Sarah Jones, one of the \u201ctimely\u201d crowd, explains, \u201cOf course, we don\u2019t divide women into classes of Marthas, Handmaids, Econowives, and Wives; we call them \u2018the help,\u2019 \u2018surrogates,\u2019 the working class, and the one percent.\u201d<\/p>\n

At first I scoffed. There couldn\u2019t be any more unlikely a theocrat than Trump, what with his misquotes from the Bible and speculation that he hasn\u2019t been in a church more than twice since the inauguration. But then I realized that the liberal paranoiacs were right. Except not in the way they think. Instead of seeing Atwood\u2019s fictional Gilead as a near-future militant fundamentalist Christian elite dystopia, we should see it as the mostly secularist elite dystopia we live in right now.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the Los Angeles Times earlier this month, Charlotte Allen discusses the “timeliness” of Hulu’s TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale: I\u2019ve lost count of the articles I\u2019ve read about Hulu\u2019s adaptation of Margaret Atwood\u2019s 1985 novel The Handmaid\u2019s Tale that used the word \u201ctimely.\u201d Timely, that is, in the sense of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,28,53,13],"tags":[360,1037,1020,101],"class_list":["post-38703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-media","category-politics","category-usa","tag-christianity","tag-donaldtrump","tag-progressives","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-a4f","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38703"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38703\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38704,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38703\/revisions\/38704"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}