The Handmaid’s Tale
On April 7, on the eve of the opening night of The Handmaid’s Tale, a young woman in Starr County, Texas, was arrested and charged with murder after she ‘intentionally and knowingly caused the death of an individual by self-induced abortion’. Proof, if proof were still needed, that Margaret Atwood’s classic 1985 novel was never a dystopian flight of fancy but rather a warning, rooted in history, that democracy is fragile and that totalitarianism lurks just around the corner. Recent events, from the renewed subjugation of women and girls in Afghanistan by the Taliban, to the use of rape as a weapon of war by Putin’s troops in Ukraine, have served only to reinforce the ongoing relevance of Atwood’s work. It is never not timely.
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