Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

MARGARET ATWOOD: "The Handmaid's Tale"

is about a future society that has replaced the United States,

as we know it today.

And it's called Gilead.

And we follow the fortunes of one of the inhabitants of it.

It's a society that has regulated people into castes.

It's a society that has regulated people into castes.

They are identified by the kind of clothing that they wear.

And certain women, who have the now rare ability

to have children, are called handmaids.

So the handmaids are allocated to the top people

in the society and their wives, in order

to act as surrogate mothers for them.

to act as surrogate mothers for them.

The wives then get the children.

And the handmaid has to move on.

So that is their function.

And we follow the story of one of these women.

And that is straight out of the Bible,

because in name it is a biblical kind of totalitarianism.

And in the Bible, we have Rachel and Leah.

And then we have a baby contest between them.

And then we have a baby contest between them.

And in order to have more babies,

they enlist their handmaids and have babies

by the handmaids, which they themselves

get to name and to keep.

So that's the model for it, much as under Hitler there

were these biological wives.

So if you were an SS man, you could

have more than one woman, to produce more little SS

have more than one woman, to produce more little SS

children.

At that time I was living in West Berlin.

The wall around West Berlin was still in place.

And therefore, I was seeing all of this in action.

What kicked it off was a conversation

I was having with a friend of mine.

And what we were talking about was the idea

that some people were already having then,

that women should go back into the home.

So if women should go back into the home,

So if women should go back into the home,

how are you going to get them there?

So that was a problem to be solved.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

"The Handmaid's Tale" came from three different, let us say,

bodies of knowledge.

The 17th century Puritans, who had

their stronghold in Cambridge, Massachusetts,

their stronghold in Cambridge, Massachusetts,

where this novel is set.

Harvard started as a theological seminary.

And the 17th century Puritans were not Democrats.

This was not a democratic society.

It was a theocracy.

And they had some pretty interesting rules.

For instance, pointing and laughing

were quite frowned upon.

And so were Quakers.

They were not fond of Quakers.

They were not fond of Quakers.

They hanged some of them.

So I had studied this because I had to.

I had to fill my gap.

And I was lucky enough to have a man called Perry Miller, who

originated the study of American Puritans

in American universities and was still teaching at that time.

So these were also some of my ancestors.

They were in those Quaker-hanging Puritans.

So I was pretty interested in them.

So I was pretty interested in them.

That was one.

Number two was my study of utopias and dystopias

as literary forms.

So I was one of those teenagers who

was reading "Brave New World."

I was reading "1984," about the time it was first published.

First edition, paperback, I still have it.

Those sorts of books, Ray Bradbury, John Wyndham,

Those sorts of books, Ray Bradbury, John Wyndham,

I was mainlining those as a teenager.

And I had always pretty much wanted to write one.

But most of them were from the point of view of men.

So I thought it would be interesting to take

one of those dystopic societies and flip it, and see

what that felt like from the point of view of a woman in it.

Another question was, if the United States

Another question was, if the United States

were going to have a totalitarianism--

because totalitarianisms are the third body of knowledge.

Having been born in 1939, I was quite familiar with them,

having lived through parts of some of them.

If the United States were to have a totalitarianism,

what kind of totalitarianism would it be?

It would not be, Hi, my name is Bob.

I'm a communist.

And I'm now going to be your fearless leader.

And I'm now going to be your fearless leader.

That's unlikely ever to happen.

So if it wasn't going to be that, what would it be?

I thought it most likely that it would

be some form of fundamentalist theocracy.

And we were seeing already in the 1980s,

the resurgence of that kind of thinking in the United States.

Let us not forget that had the United States not

Let us not forget that had the United States not

entered World War II, with Pearl Harbor,

they might have ended up with somebody

like Charles Lindbergh for president,

a fascist sympathizer.

So this was not really that far off the possible.

And at the time, I was writing.

Although it was the '80s and the civil rights movement

Although it was the '80s and the civil rights movement

had happened, we were by no means

in a situation in which everybody in the country

was viewed as equal, as having equal rights.

And we are still not.

So all of that thinking fed in.

The rule that I made for the book

was that nothing went into it that

had not happened in real life, somewhere, at some time.

had not happened in real life, somewhere, at some time.

And that's why I collected all of the research.

And the reason I made that rule is that I didn't want anybody

saying, you certainly have a twisted, weird, evil

imagination.

You made up all these bad things.

I didn't make them up.

So that is one of the functions of research

in a novel like this.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Let us look at some of the research.

These are all from the mid-80s.

"Charges of brain-washing.

Catholics say cult taking over."

So this is the disciples of an 1,100-member religious sect are

practicing brainwashing.

And they subordinate women.

They discourage social contact with nonmembers.

They discourage social contact with nonmembers.

They arrange marriages.

And they move teenage disciples to,

quote, "households for indoctrination."

I didn't make it up.

All right.

Here we go.

That was a Catholic sect.

But there have been a number of different sorts

of cults of this kind.

Their treatment of women is very Islamic,

somebody said in the mid-80s.

Brainwashing, People of Hope, et cetera.

Brainwashing, People of Hope, et cetera.

So they weren't actually forcing people to join this cult.

But the wives of the coordinators are called,

quotes, "handmaidens."

As I say, I didn't make it up.

But that's straight out of the Bible, anyway.

Again, a lot of research on Mormons, for instance.

And on American slavery, who was allowed to read,

who was not allowed to read, the Underground Railroad.

who was not allowed to read, the Underground Railroad.

The "Handmaid's Tale" has a similar escape route.

Going through the research materials,

you will come across efforts to control reproduction one

way or another, either to make people have more babies

or to make people have fewer babies.

Totalitarian regimes are big on that

because they want planned societies, like really planned.

because they want planned societies, like really planned.

And sometimes those go spectacularly off the rails.

So Ceausescu, in Romania, mandated that women

should have four children.

He gave them pregnancy tests every month.

And if they weren't pregnant, they had to say why.

And, of course, what that meant was

that people were having children that they

couldn't afford to support.

And they were putting them in orphanages.

And that created really a pretty bad situation in Romania.

And that created really a pretty bad situation in Romania.

But that's in the "Handmaid's Tale" historical notes.

I reference a lot of those things in the notes.

So the cults-- the credit cards, how you

would cut people's money off.

So if you wanted to get women back into the home,

you would have to reverse the financial progress

that they made over the past, say, 150 years.

So they moved from a point where they

couldn't control their own money or have

couldn't control their own money or have

really any kinds of jobs that were not servant jobs.

They moved out of that position, into the 20th century

and the 21st century, in which they gain the right

to control their own finances, have their own bank

accounts, own houses, that kind of thing.

So how would you get them back into the home?

You'd have to immediately cut that off.

Cut off the access to money.

Cut off the access to money.

And the credit card, unfortunately,

allows you to do that, should you wish to, very quickly.

In fact, any form of electronic sorting and tagging

allows you to do that kind of control

in a way that wouldn't have been possible before.

So here comes the credit card.

And I would suggest that you not get rid of cash money.

And I would suggest that you not get rid of cash money.

Cash money is actually more fluid than credit card money.

And it's much harder to control your access to it.

So cash can be a security problem.

Checks can bounce, et cetera, et cetera, all this rationale.

This is January, 1984.

People were already thinking of getting rid of cash money.

Don't do it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I sometimes do draw little sketches of things in my books.

"The Handmaid's Tale" is very dependent on clothing

and what people are wearing because,

like medieval societies, it's very

specific who is wearing what.

So the costume is apparently inspired by nuns, of course.

But also by the old Dutch Cleanser package of the 1940s,

But also by the old Dutch Cleanser package of the 1940s,

which showed this pretty sinister looking woman

holding a great big stick.

And she was supposed to be chasing the dirt.

But she had a bonnet that was hiding her face.

So I think I imprinted on that as a innocent child.

It was quite a mysterious figure.

I did the costumes as red because, of course,

I did the costumes as red because, of course,

it's a iconic color.

So none of these ideas are particularly new.

And they weren't new--

they weren't new then.

So the eye is a sort of logo, particularly for the Secret

Service.

And sometimes, of course, it's got wings on it.

The Secret Service people in the regime are called the Eyes.

The Secret Service people in the regime are called the Eyes.

They're the people who do all the unpleasant spy work.

The eye is off the American money, basically a Masonic eye,

off the Great Seal.

But it is also the eye of God, that

rolls around over all of the world, seeing everything.

The thing about totalitarianisms is that they're

very big on logos and designs.

And this totalitarianism is no different.

And this totalitarianism is no different.

If only Hitler had been accepted at art school,

world history would have been different

because he was happiest when designing costumes and stage

sets.

That's what he really liked about his regime.

There's a movie about that called

"The Architecture of Doom," which

goes into his architectural interests.

You can see why he wasn't accepted at art school

because although he could draw buildings,

because although he could draw buildings,

he couldn't do people, really hardly at all.

What does that tell you?