The Rise of Gilead

In the 1980s, Margaret Atwood wrote a chilling psychological thriller called The Handmaid's Tale, about a woman trapped in an insane theocractic dystopia where she is forced into sexual slavery. The narrative is in diary form, so you only experience the perspective of the titular handmaid. From her foggy memories you get a picture of how she got where she is: a Christian nationalist movement violently overthrew the U.S. government and installed a repressive regime based on bizarre interpreations of scripture. Since there are few fertile women left in a world ravaged by pollution and disease, those who are able to bear children are forced to do so in service of the elites. The regime contends with resistance movements and war on its borders, but this is only understood as rumors and general knowledge. There aren't a lot of details given. The story is light on plot and ends ambiguously.

I thought it was a great book, if a little farfetched in its predictions. It might have made sense for an understanding of possible near futures in the 1980s, and it does show an understanding of the nature of social change, which tends to overcorrect for the mistakes of previous generations. In this story, fundamentalist Christians take over the country, and overcompensate for what they perceive to be a society in moral decay by imposing religious law. Certainly it is credible to compare the vision of The Handmaid's Tale with the reactionary politics of our time. In fact, the blurbs at the front of the 1987 edition I read describe the setting as "a fascist country controlled by...the Moral Majority" and "life after the extreme right has had its way."

In 2017, the novel was adapted into a television series. The TV show was more of an action-adventure political thriller, and followed the perspective of multiple characters who were only seen through the handmaid's eyes in the original material. The show went on for many seasons, fleshing out the stories of these other characters, and taking us to locations only hinted at in the book. With so much more world building, a better picture emerges of the timeline and of the state of the new "Republic of Gilead."

Spoilers: the timeline involves a terrorist attack on DC and subsequent takeover by radical Christians, who round up all the citizens deemed to be living outside of the boundaries of moral permissibility and then assign them to various degrees of servitude, or simply execute them. Laws are passed making it illegal for women to own property, or even to read, relegating them to slave status. Gilead is called a "republic" but the exact machinations of its government aren't clear, just that it is ruled by a small council of male leaders, assisted by a powerful and menacing security agency that strictly enforces the republic's draconian laws. Transgressors are killed and their bodies hung for display as a warning to the rest of the republic's citizens. A true terror state.

The republic is divided into administrative regions called "districts." Some districts are in depopulated areas called "colonies" that are so environmentally degraded they are essentially uninhabitable. Workers are sent there for cleanup duty as a form of punishment or exile; being sent to the colonies amounts to a death sentence. The republic does not hold all of the original territory of the continental United States. On the borders there is still resistance and the republic is in a constant state of war with the regions that refuse to assimilate.

There are a few scenes in the show in which maps of Gilead appear in the background, supporting the narrative. I found the map below on an awesome fan site. I don't think the map is official, but it looks great and clearly shows the districts, the war zones, and the uninhabitable zones. One can only imagine what awful fate San Francisco and Los Angeles must have suffered.

Could this sort of break-up of the United States of America actually happen? A religous fundamentalist takeover followed by war against the invevitable resistance? What seemed in the 1980s like a fanciful prediction, useful for making a moral point, seems prophetic in the 2020s. Roe v. Wade has been overturned, and a Republican presidential candidate with a decent shot at the White House is ready to hit the ground running with a radical conservative action plan and the Supreme Court in his pocket. Could Obergefell v. Hodges be next?

The Handmaid's Tale television series premiered just after the 2016 election. Ever since, it has been fodder for memes coming from the political left, warning about the dangerous rise of the religious right and the ways it is imposing a Handmaid's Tale-like society on us, right before our very eyes. The video below is a good example of what I mean, identifying many parallels between our times and the world of the handmaid.

Certainly the timeline as given in Atwood's book and in the subsequent material (including a sequel she wrote in 2019) will not happen. But could we realistically get closer to a takeover by the religious right? Well, check out the forecast in this ominous (and admittedly propgandistic) video from The Lincoln Project:

The video above was made before Biden dropped out of the race and was replaced by Harris. I am writing this in the summer of 2024. There's no telling how close to Gilead the United States will come. If you are reading this in 2025 or beyond, you will have a much better idea.

This page copyright Steve Barrera 2024