Toxic Environments in The Handmaid's Tale, its Sequels, and Other Feminist Dystopias

• Main Author: Hajdu, Péter
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2024
• Subjects: Margaret Atwood; The Testaments; fertility crisis; climate change; pollution; female body; post- apocalyptic narratives
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss38/16; https://archium.ateneo.edu/context/kk/article/1919/viewcontent/KK_2038_2C_202022_2016_20Forum_20Kritika_20on_20Theorizing_20Corporeality_20in_20the_20Climate_20Change_20Era_20__20Hajdu.pdf
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, was much more concerned with sexist oppression than environmental issues. The late 2010s experienced a boom in feminist dystopian novels, including a sequel by Atwood herself, and the television series adaptation of the novel is also part of this trend. This development evolves in a much more environmentally conscious context, which necessarily influences the interpretation both of the 1985 novel and the sequels. This article offers readings of recent feminist dystopias from the viewpoint of current environmental crises, especially the pollution crisis and climate change. The basic problem the religious fundamentalist regime of Gilead tries to deal with is widespread infertility, and nowadays (unlike in 1985) most readers/watchers must suppose that it is probably caused by environmental pollution. With this hypothesis, however, we can interpret The Handmaid’s Tale in the context of material agency as an allegory of the human activity, which transforms the ecosystem in such a way that it eventually endangers the survival of the human race. The Gilead regime tries to legitimize its solution, the collectivization of the fertile female body, by falsely blaming women. Most of the recent feminist dystopias take as their point of departure a situation in which the number of fertile women is seriously diminished due to causes that may or may not be related to climate change. What makes many of them fail as warnings is a tendency to represent local dystopic realities that seem to have developed as a reaction to local rather than global environmental challenges.