The recent TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale has been generating a lot of buzz lately, much of which centers around the realness of the plot - the story is scary because it could actually happen. I haven't watched the show, but I just recently finished the novel, and the novel is indeed terrifying in its realness, not just because Gilead can be compared to Trump's America. Here are some thoughts on the stylistic elements Atwood uses that brings Gilead from an unlikely dystopian state to one that seems able to actually materialize.
A gradual fight over power gives time for the current government to counteract; a sudden coup eliminates any chances to react. That is what happened with the formation of Gilead, and Atwood makes this very clear. Atwood emphasizes this suddenness with the brevity she used to describe the coup: "...they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time." The transition wasn't slow; it was swift, bloody, and almost too easy. Just a couple of sentences to topple a known world, and the scapegoat given is eerily relevant to the current state of affairs.
Atwood also offers the "why" behind Gilead's creation, near of the end of the novel, where the Commander, as one of the founding members of Gilead, argues quite matter-of-fact with the narrator that 1) Gilead gives all women equal chances of having a man and to procreate and in effect eliminates the humiliation and unfairness less attractive women could experience and 2) arranged marriages are statistically successful anyways. We do want successful marriages, and we do want equal opportunity to procreate, and yet a state created solely based on hard, matter-of-fact statistics and that does in fact achieve these "goals" is twisted and messed up.
Unlike many other dystopian novels (1984, The Hunger Games, just to name a few), this story is set in the early stages of the dystopia and explicitly tells us the events of the critical shift. The narrative is not purely in the present dystopian state, but rather connects the past and present with a terrifyingly clear turning point and some very logical reasons for the creation of the current twisted government. The connection, despite only made in a handful of sentences, along with the "practical" descriptions of Gilead's to-be, makes us believe it is all the more likely. Time to go watch the TV show and see how it recreates these powerful stylistic elements.
