Has anyone actually read The Handmaid’s Tale? Maybe Margaret Atwood has. But it seems unlikely that many of the demonstrators who hauled out their red cloaks yet again last weekend have done more than watch the HBO TV show based—rather loosely—on the 1985 novel. Thomas Aquinas was supposed to have said, “I fear a man of only one book.” These are people of only one streaming miniseries.
Margaret Atwood doesn’t seem to mind them very much. In fact she appears pleased as punch with them, which is yet another indication that she is not a serious person. Ever since she wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, the dystopian thriller implying that America in the mid-1980s was on the brink of turning women into burqa-wearing sex slaves because Ronald Reagan was president, Atwood and her non-readers have treated every political event they don’t like as their personal Iranian Revolution.
When Roe v. Wade was overturned, Atwood appeared on Twitter wearing a tart smirk and holding a mug that said “I Told You So.” Told us what, exactly? It’s unclear. Apparently, the spectacle of elected state legislatures meeting to determine abortion law was a vindication of Atwood’s prophetic warning that jackbooted patriarchs would one day pin their state-appointed concubines down by the wrists and forcibly impregnate them.
The vagueness of the metaphor, however, is the point. The success of The Handmaid’s Tale is that it’s not a sharply rendered political commentary. It’s the mass-market imitation of one, for people who don’t so much think as swim through an impressionistic slurry of half-formed associations and soft-focus images. It helps if you don’t read the book, or use complete sentences to articulate precisely what the connection is between the present situation and your cosplay fever dream.
In her defining manifesto of second-wave feminism, The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan compared being a 1960s housewife to living in a “comfortable concentration camp.” She actually put that in the title of a whole chapter. “The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive,” Friedan wrote, kind of like the millions of Jews who littered the mass graves of Auschwitz and Dachau.
Kind of, except it’s not like that at all. When Friedan published this vacuous comparison, Margaret Atwood was 23. This is the kind of feminism that shaped her outlook as a young woman. It is marked by dizzying leaps of analogical fancy from the most ghastly atrocities in world history to the privileged condition of airheaded suburbanites.
The Handmaid’s Tale improved upon this formulaby summoning a fictional nightmare scenario to replace the real-life Holocaust as the all-purpose allegory for Every Bad Thing. This was, it must be said, a stroke of genius on Atwood’s part. It meant that the wealthiest and best-fed people ever to draw breath could go on casting themselves as the wretched of the earth without ever having to get specific about particulars. You can strap on a wimple and parade around Fort Worth all you like; you will never meet any actual handmaids to accuse you of appropriating their suffering, because none exist. Their culture is literally your costume.
Plato’s word for cultures run by dullards was “theatrocracy”—rule by people who watch plenty of shows but never train their judgment. For going on a decade, the anti-Trump resistance has prominently featured a game of dress-up, symbolizing we know not quite what, played by people who watched a TV show based on a beach read. Perhaps that’s an indicator of the caliber of thought at work.