At some time during the writing, the novel’s name changed to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” partly in honor of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,”
but partly also in reference to fairy tales and folk tales: The story told by the central character partakes — for later or remote listeners — of the unbelievable, the fantastic, as do the stories told by those who have survived earth-shattering events.
So many different strands fed into “The Handmaid’s Tale” — group executions, sumptuary laws, book burnings, the Lebensborn program of the SS
and the child-stealing of the Argentine generals, the history of slavery, the history of American polygamy .
If you mean a novel in which women are human beings — with all the variety of character and behavior
that implies — and are also interesting and important, and what happens to them is crucial to the theme, structure and plot of the book, then yes.
Margaret Atwood on What ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Means in the Age of Trump -
By MARGARET ATWOODMARCH 10, 2017
In the spring of 1984 I began to write a novel that was not initially called “The Handmaid’s Tale.” I wrote in longhand, mostly on
yellow legal notepads, then transcribed my almost illegible scrawlings using a huge German-keyboard manual typewriter I’d rented.
There are two reading audiences for Offred’s account: the one at the end of the book, at an academic conference in the future, who are free to read
but who are not always as empathetic as one might wish; and the individual reader of the book at any given time.
This name is composed of a man’s first name, “Fred,”
and a prefix denoting “belonging to,” so it is like “de” in French or “von” in German, or like the suffix “son” in English last names like Williamson.
