On the odiousness of Margaret Atwood, and the vapidity of her novel's Hulu adaptation

How is 'The Handmaid's Tale' TV show even dumber than the book?

I’m going to wind up defending

Margaret Atwood

by the end of this piece, but I want to let you know just how hard that is going to be for me.

Because I hate Margaret Atwood.

I hate her so much that when I read these lines by Al Purdy it’s like watching one of those “oddly satisfying” videos where a Korean person crushes balls of sparkly foam. This is my ASMR.

There's Margaret Atwood
She is accepting the Nobel Prize
Reporters are crowding around with tears in their eyes
Asking why she is so marvelous
She replies
Simply and modestly
I am Margaret Atwood

I hate her corny-ass shit. I hate her smug fucking face and her smug fucking writing style. I hate her shitty personality and her shitty opinions—for instance, I hate her odious copyright hawkishness. Here’s an excerpt from the time Margaret Atwood called in to Parliament to protest against, among other things, allowing schoolteachers to use the work of writers like her for educational purposes without paying her first:

These arguments are not only fucking evil (imagine trying to frame yourself as the good guy while demanding schoolteachers be criminally charged for trying to teach schoolchildren), they’re fucking stupid to boot. Atwood, a supposedly full-grown adult woman with a hypothetically-extant brain in her skull, once even went so far as to say “if copyrights were cars, this would be car theft.” …What? If anything were a car, its theft would be car theft. If my pen were a car, then someone swiping it would be a car thief—therefore what? He should be prosecuted as if he had literally stolen a car, you fucking moron? Whatever—send all the schoolteachers to prison. What’s important is Margaret has more money.¹

Atwood’s attempt to suggest that copyright law should just be a mirror of property law—property law being an often already absurd subject made even more absurd if it was applied as-is without modification to fucking ideas—could take up an entire article by itself, and there’s already too much to get to, though these next items also bear some connection to her inability to understand elementary semantic distinctions (an ability which grows more and more obtuse the more the semantics affect her personally). Clearly worrying that the ghettoizing label of “science fiction” would take away from her esteem in the “serious” literary landscape, Atwood has rejected the label several times and has, such as while she was touring her novel Oryx and Crake, opted to instead call her ostensibly sci-fi novels “speculative fiction” because “science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen.” I would like to first point out that “spaceships” are literally real and that (and maybe Atwood missed this one, I know her work is so remarkably well-researched) mankind has already been to space. I would like to secondly point out that Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake is about a world where the human race has been made extinct because they were given a bad batch of Cialis. The book also has literal fucking monsters in it, but I guess at least it’s not too “unrealistic.” At least they never go to fucking space.

Margaret Atwood has also historically been a racial chauvinist. Survival, her effective survey on Canadian literature, has a section on “First Peoples”—don’t worry, she doesn’t mean work by First Peoples, she means about First Peoples specifically. As she puts it: “all the books in this chapter are by White people. What the Indians themselves think is another story, and one that is just beginning to be written,” and that’s where she begins and ends on the matter. Just beginning? Maggie, George Copway had written his memoir over a century before your book. E. Pauline Johnson isn’t mentioned once. Yet we have to pause to take seriously the poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott, Canada’s most prodigious mass murderer of Indians, in spite of the fact that it sucks absolute ass and seeks to say nothing about Canada he hasn’t just cribbed from Wordsworth about Britain (as well as the fact that his “historical significance” was greatly exaggerated as part of the national propaganda project that was New Canadian Library, which I’ll write on another time). But nothing is more repulsive than her hypocrisies concerning women, especially when one considers the extent to which she’s made her career posturing about caring about them.

My wife once said that the principal issue with Atwood is that people assume she’s a feminist when in fact she’s just a narcissist—she only appears to care about “women” because she herself is one and her primary concern is herself. What happens to other women is a tragedy only if their experience is shared by Atwood. If it’s not, then they can go jump off a bridge, such as when Atwood took to defending UBC professor Steven Galloway when he was alleged to have groomed, sexually harassed, sexually assaulted, and physically assaulted a woman, supported by several ancillary complaints, because Atwood and Galloway happen to be friends. Sorry—Atwood has claimed that she was merely supporting due process (a routine canard for supporting abusers also expressed verbatim by Harvey Weinstein’s lawyer), it just so happens that Atwood and Galloway are also friends. Some people did not respond well to this move. Atwood, who has throughout her career refused the label of “feminist,” then turned around on her critics to hit them with this smug retort:

Oh shut the fuck up you petulant twerp—yes, you are. The obvious intent here is to suggest that, what? Me? Margaret Atwood? You’d call me a bad feminist? 😏 Feminist or not, that’s not the point. The point, Maggie, is that you went to bat for a man who provably fucked his own student, someone he was in an explicit position of power over, and was alleged to have even raped and strangled her, and now you’re trying to dodge criticism by disingenuously hiding behind a label you yourself have claimed you don’t accept. Why does Margaret Atwood get a pass? Because she wrote some second-wave feminist novels? Well, we know which of her books she particularly leans on—her mammoth blockbuster and eternal meal-ticket The Handmaid’s Tale, one of the most insipid books to ever win the Governor General’s Award (and that’s saying something). So let’s talk about that piece of shit.

Margaret Atwood is a competent word-to-word writer—a very competent writer in this regard, perhaps one of the most sensuously-adept writers we have, with an ability to render the experiences of the senses that is well-deserving of respect—but her talents are on the whole hamstrung by her painful shallowness, and so this talent can often wind up in service of tepid hackery. As demonstrated, this is a person who thinks pointing out that ‘when a car is stolen it’s car theft’ is a compelling legal argument, which is to say that Atwood is a fundamentally stupid person, and while fundamentally stupid people can still write occasionally good books (see: the even dumber John Updike), they very rarely stumble into writing smart books, and so they often flounder when trying to say something that goes beyond poetically-ambiguous (Barthelme’s “Not-Knowing,” Keats’ “Negative Capability,” whatever you want to call it) and gets into the territory of making a more “concrete point” and getting specific (see: John Updike going from writing vacuous himbo novels about “man’s nature” to trying to talk seriously about Islamic fundamentalism in Terrorist). Hence Atwood’s more “realist” novels (like The Edible Woman, Surfacing, etc.) in my opinion tend to fare better than her speculative fiction ones, because the act of “speculating” requires an expression of one’s internal logic that makes it a lot more clear just how barren Atwood’s mind is of substantial activity. The Handmaid's Tale is a good example of this, because it’s a remarkably unsubtle and groan-inducing book that reads like elevated YA fic.

I liked The Handmaid’s Tale when I first read it, but that has a lot to do with the fact that I was something like fifteen and all dystopian fiction resonated with my frustrated teenage feeling that “Parents Just Don’t Understand.” Returning to the novel in adulthood is a cringing experience, because dystopian fiction has a tendency to revel in whatever the author believes is society’s greatest concern, and what Atwood’s concerns are are… well…. As my wife said, all Atwood really cares about is herself, and this is why The Handmaid’s Tale is about one of the least likely ultimate victims of an ascendant fascist government in America: a middle class White professional.

Our protagonist, Offred, once a white-collar worker, has her life upended when the United States of America is taken over by far-right theocrats who strip her of all her rights and make her into a rape slave, a “Handmaid” whose job is to be a concubine for a member of the new patriarchal elite. Handmaids have numbers written on their ankles, an obvious Holocaust reference, and there’s an extremely stupid story in which a woman is shot to death trying to reach for her ID because they think she’s reaching for a weapon:

Last week they shot a woman, right about here.... She was fumbling in her robe, for her pass, and they thought she was hunting for a bomb.

…which is obviously a reference to the countless times this happens to Black Americans. Handmaids have slave names to boot, which clarify their ownership (the protagonist of the novel is named “Offred,” which marks her as belonging to Fred), and Offred tried to escape all of this by… ahem… escaping to Canada, an obvious nod to the Underground Railroad which helped escaped slaves. By making these problems the purview of middle class White women, one establishes a grotesque fantasy of suffering which appropriates from the experiences of the world’s historically most downtrodden in order to form an amalgam that effectively trumps them all. It’s remarkable she didn’t somehow seek to make them Indigenous as well. It’s all very reminiscent of the perpetual claims from Zionists that antisemitic pogroms are coming to North America “any day now.”

The only thing more obnoxious and histrionic than the novel itself is the people who like it. The cowl from The Handmaid’s Tale has effectively just become the Anonymous Guy Fawkes mask but for annoying women instead of annoying men. In spite of the fact that no matter how bad things get for women in America broadly—and don’t mistake my sentiments here, they’re going to get bad—there is absolutely no believable future in which middle-class White women will ever experience the Chattel Slavery Institutional-Rape Holocaust Where They Also Get Extra-judicially Murdered By Cops portrayed by the book, nor anything remotely resembling it. Many nevertheless seem to believe it’s right around the corner—Atwood herself encourages this derangement, such as when Roe v. Wade was overturned and she appeared in a photo smugly smiling and holding an “I Told You So” mug.

Firstly: go fuck yourself, you narcissistic freak. There’s nothing fucking cute or twee about access to abortion being curtailed. Why the fuck are you smiling? Atwood’s unbelievable tone-deafness in taking this photo speaks to her profound sense of self-involvedness and quite frankly says all it needs to about who this woman actually is. Secondly: you told us so? What are you fucking talking about? When The Handmaid’s Tale was published in 1985, abortion was a crime in Canada, and our own Roe v. Wade equivalent, R. v. Morgentaler, was still three years away—access to abortion in Canada in 1985 was arguably worse than the United States here in early 2025. That one detail of her book was already the case in her home country, so how could she have “told us” about it when it was already her extant reality? And what about the other details, Margaret? I feel like insofar as “predictions” go there’s a lot that has to happen before you can say you “told us” anything at all in that book. I once went to see William Gibson read and when a person asking a question referred to him as “predicting all of this,” he humbly responded, “No, I didn’t—they still had payphones in Neuromancer.” Gibson, to his credit, did still “predict” a hell of a lot more in his books than Atwood ever did, insofar as those books can “predict” things or whether that’s even the real purpose of science fiction in the first place. The real purpose of Atwood’s book, however, may be more insidious.

Why the book received the fanfare it did and won the Governor General’s Award is similar to why Kim Thúy’s book did likewise (and I’ve written about Thúy’s case at length here). The Handmaid’s Tale, like most Western dystopian fiction (most of it bad), is about the emulation of the enemy. Books like Nineteen-Eighty-Four and The Giver are propaganda meant to fear-monger about what “totalitarian” communism would look like on our own shores, two-dimensional visions of frigid, repressive orders with inhuman goals—“there will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed… imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever,” says the antagonist of Orwell’s novel. Sentiments such as these are uttered and then, via the validating process of literary prestige, are taken seriously, even though the inference that the Soviets—hell, even the fucking Nazis—were ideologically “against enjoyment” is completely delusional. The Handmaid’s Tale operates likewise. It is “about” the United States, but its ideological usefulness has been in propagandizing against our “illiberal” Islamist enemies in countries like Iran and Afghanistan. Much like the United States used to airdrop copies of Nineteen-Eighty-Four over Soviet nations, Iranian women are given copies of The Handmaid’s Tale and begin dressing up like handmaids in protests backed by US intelligence. The recognizable symbolism resonates with Western liberal readers of the book when they see it on TV, and this can be used to manufacture Western consent for destructive regime change operations—and with it regional instability and countless dead which will leave the aforementioned women even worse for wear (see similar “humanitarian” concerns about Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, etc. and how those turned out).

I hate The Handmaid’s Tale. I hate Margaret Atwood. However, we are now at the dawn of yet another season of the novel’s TV adaptation tomorrow night, and somehow the writers of the show are so fucking dense they even ignored what little subtlety the book ever had in the first place and managed to miss the point of some of its most important details, putting me in the awkward position of having to defend the relative merits of a book I despise because their representation seeks to make the book even fucking dumber. Take the book’s consideration of race, for instance. Gilead is a White supremacist state that has forcibly removed its Black population, what Gilead calls the “Children of Ham,” and sent them to work camps or something. In the novel, once written out, Black people become functionally irrelevant to the plot because of course Atwood's principal concern is the plight of White middle class women, because Atwood's primary anxiety is what would happen to her in a hypothetical fascist future state. As we’ve already explained, Atwood goes so far in the book as to take the suffering of other groups throughout history and attribute them all to White women in her speculative future, so those groups have to quickly get out of the way or it might be distracting.

But the TV show, as TV shows are wont to do, has introduced Black characters into The Handmaid’s Tale where none previously existed. Because… I don’t know, representation or something. As always, such as with adding Black characters to Lord of the Rings and then giving one a fade, the show-runners were in such a rush to diversify that they never paused for a second to think about how they were doing it, whether they were doing it thoughtfully, and what it “meant” in the context of the story they were telling.² Gilead, again, is supposed to be a White supremacist state, so the fact that the show has introduced Black handmaids suggests that the Gilead elite actually have no problem with producing interracial children for themselves. This, in effect, makes the Gilead of the TV show less racist that the Gilead of the fucking book! They try to ameliorate this in the show several seasons in, probably after having their mistake pointed out (whoops), by having the antagonist Aunt Lydia at one point comment about “handmaids of colour,” but that only draws more attention to the problem here, and the persistence of “handmaids of colour” regardless of Lydia’s opinions makes Lydia’s expression of racism personal rather than systemic.

But it doesn’t stop there. The showrunners’ absolute vacuity is so immense and their decisions so fucking thoughtless as to make this narrative dissonance even more glaring than it already is. This is because, based on some of their other choices, it seems as if it isn’t just that Gilead doesn’t care if Commanders have Black children—they actively want them! Take a look at this lineup:

There’s about forty-nine women here I’d say we can see enough of to make guesses about their races. Of those forty-nine, about six to nine appear to be Black. That roughly corresponds to the current Black population of the United States, which is presently in the ballpark of 14.4% of the overall population, meaning that in this image Black women are a lot more equitably represented than even occurs as a result of some of the most well-intentioned HR programs in the tech industry. Considering that in the world of The Handmaid's Tale environmental factors (pollution and such) have resulted in declining fertility rates in the United States, and considering that poor people tend to suffer the brunt of the damage from pollution, and that Black people are generally over-represented among the poor, one expects that the Black population in the United States may have actually gone down by the time Gilead comes into existence—so what is going on exactly? Does Gilead in fact have a robust DEI program for its sex slaves? Does this program exist so as to make the offspring of the Commanders more racially equitable? Is show-runner Bruce Miller so fucking stupid that he accidentally made Gilead “racially-progressive”?

I suppose getting the race part wrong isn’t the greatest problem in the world for the integrity of the adaptation considering how marginal race issues are in the book in the first place. Let’s instead consider something that is actually a vitally important theme in the novel: names.

Offred’s relationship to her real name and her thoughts about it are my favourite part of the book. They are the one detail I find legitimately moving in all of its 300+ pages. Throughout the novel we only ever know our protagonist by the name she has been given, “Offred,” which marks her as a possession of someone else. What Offred’s name was before is never revealed to us. In the show, however, they have “fixed” this by simply telling us Offred’s real name: it’s June, apparently, a name which comes from a popular fan theory (Atwood has openly claimed this was not her intention). I remember reading something where someone affiliated with the show claimed that they were “empowering” Offred by finally naming her. Were they? Why don’t we ask the novel’s Offred how she feels about her name?

My name isn't Offred, I have another name, which nobody uses now because it's forbidden. I tell myself it doesn't matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter. I keep the knowledge of this name like something hidden, some treasure I'll come back to dig up, one day. I think of this name as buried. This name has an aura around it, like an amulet, some charm that's survived from an unimaginably distant past. I lie in my single bed at night, with my eyes closed, and the name floats there behind my eyes, not quite within reach, shining in the dark.

Offred didn’t tell us her name because concealing her name is one of the last things she can consider a part of her private life. In a world where her role is to be raped, in a world where all autonomy is stripped of her and every privacy invaded, she finds personal strength (and with it hope) in her control of this one secret. But the new Offred, an “empowered” badass, even tells Aunt Lydia when she tries to call her Offred that “it’s June… you know my fucking name” thereby not only ruining the entire fucking point and one of the only moments in the book I find legitimately beautiful but also giving us a fucking tone-deaf Roots Kunta Kinte pastiche to boot, just so we can throw even more fucking offensive analogies here between the plight of middle-class White women and Black chattel slaves.

The novel’s Offred would never want Aunt Lydia to call her by her actual name, because what she longs for isn’t recognition of her humanity from her oppressor through the acknowledgement of her true name. She wants the power of her name to be invoked through love and respect, as we see when she reminisces about her husband:

I want Luke here so badly. I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name, remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me.

Her name, held to herself, then becomes a mantra she repeats to conjure up memories of the tenderness of being addressed by name by someone you love and who loves you. Asserting her name in defiance while demanding it come out of the mouth of an oppressor who loathes her is not the fucking point. Recognition by the oppressor would be a false gift, a performative concession by a tool of a system that still denies her humanity. This is Fanon 101: seeking validation through recognition from the oppressor is a trap, it reinforces the hierarchy it seeks to undermine. The struggle under dehumanizing conditions is not about emptily winning the oppressor’s acknowledgement—it’s about the work to preserve one’s “self” in spite of them. It is about self-affirmation. By shouting her name at Aunt Lydia, Offred is engaging with her enslaver on her enslaver’s terms. Most importantly, it’s not what Offred would want. Yes, characters can change in adaptations, but this new Offred is a worse and less interesting character, she has been turned into a girlboss pussyhat hero, she is devoid of depth and emotional complexity.

Margaret Atwood remains what she has always been: a talented stylist with the depth of a puddle, a faux-feminist who rallies behind abusers when it suits her, and a greedy capitalist ghoul who thinks schoolteachers should go to jail for photocopying her books. The fact that Hollywood could take her work and still somehow make it even worse is almost poetic, a true testament to the cretinous intellect of the film and television production class. The Handmaid’s Tale was never prophetic, it was always a middle-class nightmare, a narcissist’s parable dressed up in other people’s borrowed trauma, but people with even smaller minds than Atwood’s managed to make it into something even worse: an empty pop-feminist aesthetic, oppression as a Halloween costume. Hey, here’s one right here!

When we’re all facing the firing squad, please remember not to ask them for your name.

RELATED

1. Atwood isn’t the only CanLit luminary to become a copyright tyrant—check out our piece about M. NourbeSe Philip and her crusade to shut down a small, innocent publisher who was trying to do the right thing.

2. I always need to add: this isn’t to say there’s no room for adding “diverse” characters to an adaptation, it’s just that it has to be done thoughtfully. It almost never is—however, its poor implementation is sometimes intentionally done to bait online controversy.