Talk at the University of Rouen. (November 16 th, 1998)

1M. Atwood: Bonjour mesdames et messieurs, et les pauvres etudiants. J’ai pitie de vous; c’est un de mes cauchemars que j’ai encore un examen a ecrire... et c’est toujours en chinois.

2But I’m going to do this in English, so don’t worry. It’s a very great pleasure and a privilege to be here. This part of France is very special for Canadians – Dieppe is not far from here, the beaches of Normandy remain a very large part of our own national mythology, if I may call it that, so I am very pleased to be here, and I must return.

3We have two subjects to discuss today. One is the genesis of The Handmaid’s Tale, how it came to be written. And the second is the Historical Notes at the back, their significance and function in the book. So I will talk first about the genesis of the novel, which is like pulling up a plant to look at the roots, which sometimes kills the plant. We will try not to do that today. I think every book that a writer writes is written with his or her entire life – and this is the reason why the older you get, the longer your books become. The Handmaid’s Tale is an imagined world, and all novels are to a certain extent imagined worlds, but there is a difference between worlds that do not yet exist, such as the worlds of science fiction and speculative fiction, and the imagined worlds that may already have existed, such as historical novels. I began with the creation of imagined worlds very early in childhood. I had an older brother, and I believe it was he who began this creation of imagined worlds. We had an ongoing saga, that we took turns telling, the rules seemed to be that when you got tired, the other person had to take over as narrator, and this was an imagined world which was populated by flying, carnivorous rabbits who were constantly at war with their enemies, who were a society of evil foxes. The rabbits won the battles, but the war I don’t think was ever completely determined. This was a monarchy and had a king; and things went on from there. So that was the first imagined world that I participated in, before, indeed, I could read.

4Once I could read, we continued the saga, we used to write it as well as tell it, and we also used to write comic books concerning it. We were the comic book generation, by which I mean there was no television yet, and we didn’t go to many movies, but we did have a l arge collection of comic books and most of these were about imagined worlds. You may recall some of the classics, which have since appeared in movies: Superman, who I didn’t much care for; Batman, I preferred him; Wonderwoman, who flew around in a transparent glass airplane, and had very curious muscles... She was quite an interesting character because she lived with a group of Amazons, and she had a boyfriend, but if he kissed her she: lost all of her superpowers -1 think this is the beginning of The Handmaid’s Tale. And the Marvel Family, consisting of Captain Marvel, Mary Marvel and Junior Marvel, they were good. You know, there’s a church in Italy that has the head of John the Baptist and also the head of John the Baptist as a child, and the Marvel family was like that because Junior Marvel was not the son of Captain Marvel, he was Captain Marvel as a child – but they sometimes appeared in the same episode! Okay, so comic books.

5Then I began to read, and I read a number of things that were utopias and dystopias, although I didn’t know that at the time. I read Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, under the illusion that it was a children’s book; I read Animal Farm, by George Orwell, under the illusion that it was a children’s book about kind and pleasant animals, and I was horrified by it, because the horse died; and I also used to read Boy’s Own Adventures. Boy’s Own was an English magazine, very popular around the beginning of the XXth century, and there was a big collection of them in the attic of my grandparents’. I used to read them, and they frequently involved adventures into other cultures, where things were arranged differently. A lot of the impulse behind utopias and dystopias is archaeological because the cultures described in utopias and dystopias are other cultures, so I think part of this impulse came from archaeology and anthropology. Then, as an adolescent, I read a lot of science fiction. Nineteen Eighty-Four was published around this time, I read it immediately; I read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley; I read Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, which is not a utopia/dystopia proper, but described a real dystopia, namely the former USSR under Stalin. I read a lot of John Wyndham, one of the classic writers of science fiction of the 30’s and 40’s, in particular a story of his called Consider Her Ways, in which there are no men, they’ve all been killed off by disease, and the women have rearranged society somewhat along the lines of ants. Those women! I read Anatole France’s Penguin Island, which is a satire and, indeed, most utopias/dystopias have an element of social satire in them. There is of course H. G. Wells’ classic The Time Machine, which is arranged along class lines; and some odd books such as The War with the Newts and R. U. R by Karl c & apek, and a completely humourless, rather boring book called Looking Backwards by Edward Bellamy, which I would call a capitalist utopia: it’s full of supermarkets and gadgets – everybody has lots of gadgets in it. In university I continued along with this kind of reading: the original Utopia by Thomas More, of course, and some XIXth century utopias. The XIXth century was the age of Utopian thinking, both in literature and in real life, and it’s sobering to recall that capitalism itself was once a Utopian scheme: it was proposed as the scheme that would fix everything, the free-market economy was going to make us all very, very happy. News from Nowhere by William Morris is a socialist utopia, Erewhon by Samuel Butler is a satirical utopia in which illness is a crime for which you’re put in jail, and crime is an illness which has to be cured. I think we’re more or less at that point now. So I was doing all this kind of reading really for pleasure, it wasn’t a study, it was just something I liked to do. I read a lot of that, and I also used to read obscure vampire novels and things like that. There is an interesting utopia called A Crystal Age by W. H. Hudson, in which the population problem is solved by doing away with sex altogether, except for one couple which is chosen to carry things on – again you can see the "ant hill" motif coming into play. Our poor visitor from the past unfortunately still has his sexual urges, and of course he has a dreadful time in this very beautiful society in which everybody weaves and makes stained-glass windows, but is not interested in him. I also read a lot of history around this time, Nazi Germany, the USSR, colonial Africa, and many another story of bad behaviour.

6So that’s one whole block of things that contributed to this book. Next comes the fact that I was required to study the history of XVIIth century Puritan America. It was part of graduate school; I was at Harvard, and you had to write five exams in different areas of literature. Four of them were on English literature and one was on American literature from the beginning to about 1930. You may laugh, and say "There wasn’t any in the XVIIth century", and in a way that’s true, there wasn’t any of what you and I might call literature, but there were a lot of sermons, and private journals – you know, Puritans are very keen on keeping private journals about what God told them to do – so I did study that, and any stories you may have been told about the Puritans going to the United States to set up a free-thinking, liberal democracy, are not true. This was a theocracy, it was very rigid: the first thing, as Nathaniel Hawthorne pointed out, that these people built was a prison, and one of the second things was a gallows on which they hanged people who didn’t happen to agree with them. So it was an attempt to set up a Utopia, God’s kingdom on earth, and Americans still sometimes revert to this way of thinking, and are quite fond of using that quotation "a city upon a hill, a light to all nations" which was used by the original XVIIth century Puritans.

7So that’s another block, XVIIth century Puritan America, and The Handmaid’s Tale is set in and around Harvard University. I can tell you that this did not please them very much, they wrote rather a sniffy review of it in their Harvard Magazine, they didn’t like the thought of all those bodies hanging on the Wall, or of the Widener library, a wonderful library by the way, being the centre of the secret service in Gilead – the place where the women get their costumes is the Brattle Theatre, Soul’s Scrolls is the Harvard Co-op, known as "the Coop", and all the other places may be identified. This is deep background for this book – one of my friends who went to Harvard with me did say: "Hasn’t anybody figured out that this book is about the Harvard English department?" – in the early 60’s, I’m sure it’s all very different now.

8More recently, several other things contributed: first of all, the rise of new technologies which allow the possibility of very great social control: in particular, the credit card. If you’re ever on the run from the law, don’t use your credit card, because you can be traced through it almost immediately. If you’ve read any John Grisham thrillers you will already know this. So, technologies. Next: the rise of the religious right in America. And I do tend to believe that if people considered "weird fringe groups" say they’re going to do a thing, if they come into power, they probably will do it. So if they say women’s place is in the home, which they do say, they’re going to have to think of a way of stuffing all those women back into their homes, because that isn’t where they are now. They’re out running around on the streets, they’re going to have to be put back, and if you want to see a society that’s doing that, right now, take a look at Afghanistan. So, next thing: my own travels in places like Iran and Afghanistan; I was in Afghanistan six weeks before the war broke out, and in Iran eight months before the fall of the Shah. I didn’t do this on purpose, I had no prevision of the future, but I was there. Next: the alarming statistics about the falling fertility rates and the rising disease and mutation rates in the industrial West, and a lot of this is directly attributable to strange chemicals in the drinking water; in other words, to industrial pollution. So there’s that, and there is also my reading in contemporary totalitarian regimes, contemporary at the time I was writing the book, such as Rumania and also Argentina under the generals. Now, totalitarian regimes don’t usually come in unless there is a condition of social and economic collapse and chaos; in other words, only if things are quite bad are people willing to give up a lot of their freedom in order to have order re-imposed. I do hope you’ve been watching the stock market?

9That’s some background. The utopia/dystopia as a form is always concerned with contemporary social patterns for the simple reason that utopia means "nowhere", it doesn’t exist – we’ve never travelled to other planets, it’s almost like writing about death, and life after death: nobody has actually been there and come back to tell us what it’s like. So this form is really about now, and our projections, our fears, hopes and desires. Utopia is about our wish-fulfilment, fantasies, and dystopia is about what we secretly think might happen instead. I began to work on this book in 1984 in West Berlin before the wall had fallen down, and I finished it in Alabama, in Tuscaloosa, home of the Ku Klux Klan, in 1985, and I think these two places are quite symbolic bookends for this novel. The great theme of utopia/dystopia as a form, and I put them together because they’re the obverse and reverse of the same thing, and they very quickly turn into each other – Utopia can very quickly become dystopia, and in fact utopia is dystopia if you happen to be somebody in it who doesn’t agree with the great scheme – the great themes of this form are as follows. It has to be an arranged society. Just a bad time is not a dystopia, just plain old chaos or being poor or being in the middle of a war, that’s not a dystopia. The dystopia has to be planned, same as utopia. What is it that people are planning in this form? Money and material goods – how they are made and distributed. Sometimes the environment is also a theme, especially in utopias connected with money and material goods. That is, the utopia tends to say, well, your society was so messy, polluted, dirty and ugly, in our utopia things are clean, wonderful, natural and beautiful. That tends to be the scheme. Another theme is clothing. Clothing is always a feature, what is worn and what cannot be worn; what is worn in utopias and what cannot be worn in dystopias, and who is permitted to wear what. Sex: who can have it, when, and with whom. In utopias it tends to be spread rather freely around – or eliminated altogether. In dystopias it’s always pretty rigidly controlled. Reproduction, how it is carried on, who is allowed to do it. In Brave New World, which some see as a dystopia and others as a utopia, babies come out of bottles. That’s doing away with the whole messy business. Power: who holds it, and how it is exercised. Utopias of course tend to be consensual, dystopias are dictatorships. What happens to those who violate the norms or laws of the system – and it has to be said that in both forms the attitude towards these people tends to be quite harsh – even in Thomas More, as I recall, adultery, if you do it a couple of times you get made into a slave, and if you keep on in your wicked ways they kill you. Even Marge Piercey’s Woman on the Edge of Time, which is a feminist utopia – and people are quite frank about it – the visitor from the past says "what happens if somebody doesn’t agree with you, doesn’t agree with your great scheme to have men breast-feed the babies?" Well, if you don’t agree you get sent to a re-education centre. "What if they still don’t agree?" "We shoot them, because why waste the money on keeping them in prison that could be spent on better things?" It’s pretty pure and simple. So both of these kinds of societies – utopias and dystopias – do have a habit of cutting off the hands and feet – and heads – of people wno do not fit the scheme. This is probably why you might not wish to live in either of these places. So those are their great themes, and The Handmaid’s Tale contains all of them.

10The function of the Historical Notes. This is the second part, you can call it "Two". The function of the Historical Notes has to do with the utopia/dystopia as a form. As I’ve already said, this form usually contains social satire of some kind, to a greater or lesser degree. But the form also contains two sub-plots: one of them I call – and you can call this:

11(a) "The Tour of the Sewage System". The tour of the sewage system is a general term for that part of the narrative which explains to the visitor – because there always is a visitor – how the society functions. Sometimes the tour of the sewage systerm is incorporated in the body of the narrative, and the visitor is the reader – so it’s the reader who has to have things such as the "memory hole" in 1984 explained. Sometimes the visitor is a character in the book, and is simply taken by the ear and shown all of the stuff, as in Looking Backwards, we have to go see all of the various gadgets and things that cause the society to be so woncierful.

12(b) I call the "Just So Story". The "Just So Story" is a part of the narrative that explains how it got that way; in other words, what were the steps that intervened between our society now and the future society which we are exploring. Sometimes this is inserted into the narrative: in Nineteen Eighty-Four it’s that pamphlet which Winston Smith comes across, which may or may not be a real pamphlet but it’s very prohibited and it tells how "Nineteen Eighty-Four" came into being. Sometimes it’s a sort of sermon delivered by a character in the novel to the visitor. I chose to put it at the end. So the Historical Notes, one of its functions is to be the "Just So Story" in the book, to tell us – the reader – what were the steps leading up, what kinds of elements were incorporated. And this is one of the things that the Professor explains in his paper. I did not wish to integrate the "Just So Story" into the body of the text, partly just because I couldn’t find a convenient place to do it. There wasn’t a visiting stranger, the visiting stranger is the reader, so you could assume that all of the people in the book already knew this stuff, and it would have been rather silly for them to have told each other things that they all already knew. So I put it afterwards, and by putting it afterwards I also fulfilled another function, and the other function is this: Nineteen Eighty-Fourends in a very bleak fashion. After all of this suffering and horror and terror and things, Winston Smith, through having been brainwashed by means of rats, as I recall, comes to love Big Brother. And you think, oh, this is awful, it’s just like Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros, where finally everyone turns into a rhinoceros, and finally he turns into someone who is complicit with the totalitarian regime and everybody says, oh, Orwell was so bleak. But think again because, after that ending of the story, there’s a second ending. The second ending is the note on Newspeak, which is written in conventional English, and it’s written in the past tense. And what that tells us is that the world of Nineteen Eighty-Fouris over, and is now being observed from the future by someone who can write about Newspeak objectively as a past historical event. So Orwell projects beyond Nineteen Eighty-Four in a quite hopeful way, a future in which all of this misery is finished with. And this is one thing that the Historical Notes in The Handmaid’s Tale also accomplishes: Gilead is over. It is now an object of historical study. Now, some people are disturbed by the fact that it’s an object of historical study because they feel that the historians studying it are taking rather a light view of it, which they are. But this is human nature: writing about history is never the same as living it. The other thing that the Historical Notes does, is it indicates that the tale that we have just read is a reconstruction. Now, the character herself, the narrator herself has said that about her own tale because she is remembering things, and remembering is always a reconstruction. So if you like, the tale that we have is a reconstruction of a reconstruction. It’s a triple reconstruction like one of those Russian dolls. However, every reading of every text is always a reconstruction. The reconstructor is the reader, who reads the text and then rearranges the elements of it in his or her mind according to his or her own priorities. Put very simply, meaning varies according to audience. There are also several audiences in this book. The audience for the narrator is someone called "You", who is most likely Luke, the husband, who is probably dead. The audience for the text is the academic conference in the Historical Notes, mediated by the two professors who have transcribed it. The audience for the entire book is the reader. And the meaning of the tale is different for all of these different audiences. I think the Historical Notes also indicate that we – the readers – never know everything about either a text or a narrator. The professors point out that there are a lot of gaps in the knowledge that they can have about who the narrator was, about who the other characters in the story are, what happened to her at the end, they don’t know, she has disappeared; this is simply real life – lots of people disappear and are never heard from again.

13So the Historical Notes is a commentary on the limited possibilities of authenticating the past, and also on the uses to which history can be put, and indeed has been put. Beyond that, it’s a convenient vehicle for indicating the real-life historical sources of the details in Gilead, because one of my rules for this novel was that I would not put anything in that had not actually happened, somewhere, sometime. I made nothing up. I made up some of the names of course, for these things, as this takes place in a reconstructed United States of America and people are very keen on brand names and slogans, so there’s quite a few of those. But as for the actual details of what people do to other people, it’s all been done. I also thought that it was a very good way to end the total book by saying, "Are there any questions?" And that is how I will now end my own speech.