Warning: this text incorporates spoilers for all seasons of The Handmaid’s Story.
Hulu’s tv adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s landmark 1985 feminist novel, The Handmaid’s Story, has now come to an finish.
The collection targeted on feminine oppression inside the imagined future religio-fascist state of Gilead. So, in mild of the Donald Trump-led Republican get together’s infringements on the reproductive rights of girls, it appears applicable that the primary collection launched in 2017, a 12 months after Trump was elected, and the ultimate collection aired shortly after his present tenure started.
The difference has been a preferred and demanding success. Nonetheless, as I argue in The Routledge Handbook of Motherhood on Display screen, regardless of its robust affiliation with ladies’s protest actions, Hulu’s adaptation misrepresents the themes of Atwood’s biting feminist dystopia. Actually, it reinforces sure attitudes that Atwood, and different feminist writers and thinkers, have been criticising for many years.
Specifically, the collection idealises white organic moms, whereas demonising or marginalising different feminine figures. Listed here are three examples of the way it does this.
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1. Childless ladies are bitter spinsters or depraved stepmothers
Atwood’s novel focuses mainly on the horror of the rape and compelled impregnation of the handmaids. However Hulu’s adaptation offers extra weight to the theme of maternal loss and the handmaids’ want to maintain their organic offspring.
The characters of the tv present evolve over six collection. This implies they require prolonged character arcs, backstories and extra emphasis on psychology than the novel. Hulu’s adaptation advanced right into a darkish maternal melodrama, the place the ethical price of feminine characters is tied to their skill to bear youngsters.
Like a standard fairy story, the difference depicts infertile ladies, older spinsters and adoptive moms in an overwhelmingly unfavourable mild. They’re often proven to be unfit moms, or merciless ladies.
Atwood’s novel makes use of comparatively flat characterisation as a way to intensify Gilead’s authoritarian construction, reasonably than particular person psychology or motivations. In distinction, Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Story develops the character of Aunt Lydia (one of many older, childless ladies who practice, bully and self-discipline the handmaids) and Serena Pleasure (the commander’s spouse within the family that June is shipped to) as central characters.
The trailer for season six of The Handmaid’s Story.
Aunt Lydia’s (Ann Dowd) backstory in season three reveals that in her pre-Gilead life, she was a lonely, ageing college trainer who suffers sexual rejection. She responds to this by spitefully eradicating a baby from the care of his loving however overworked younger, single mom.
The ethical price connected to fertile and infertile ladies within the collection is much more evident within the therapy of Serena (Yvonne Strahovski). Within the novel Serena is an outspoken advocate for conventional feminine roles. The collection takes this additional. It exhibits child‑crazed Serena actively creating the legal guidelines of Gilead – and the handmaid system – to acquire a baby. She was apparently made infertile after being shot by a protester throughout a talking engagement.
Serena is the collection’ chief antagonist all through the primary 4 seasons. This modifications in season 5. Now pregnant, Serena finds herself on the mercy of one other offended infertile girl who needs to steal her child. As soon as pregnant, Serena mellows and turns into a extra sympathetic character. This evolution might be seen to strengthen the concept infertile ladies are unfulfilled, sad ladies who can solely be redeemed via being pregnant and childbirth.
In its total view, the collection presents the spinsterish aunts as sadists who enjoyment of punishing the fertile handmaids, and the infertile commanders’ wives as chilly and shallow. In contrast to the sisterly handmaids, the latter secretly detest each other. They seem to solely worth youngsters as standing symbols.
2. It endorses intensive, ‘natural’ mothering
As many feminist critics have identified, the mannequin of child-rearing at present favoured by society is “intensive”, and endorses so-called “natural” practices and behavior (akin to unmedicated beginning and prolonged breastfeeding). These place appreciable stress on new moms.
This mode of mothering is displayed by handmaid heroines June (Elisabeth Moss) and Janine (Madeline Brewer). They present no issue in bonding with infants produced via rape, breastfeed with ease, have an innate skill to consolation their offspring and – in June’s case – even efficiently give beginning fully alone.
In distinction, the adoptive moms are cack-handed with their infants and shortly resent their maternal duties. This implies that good mothering is the protect of organic moms, to whom it comes naturally.
A recap of seasons one to 5 of The Handmaid’s Story.
3. It consigns black ladies to aspect roles
Sequence one to a few focuses largely on white handmaids. Though June’s husband (O-T Fagbenle) and greatest buddy Moira (Samira Wiley) are black, they escape to Canada within the first season, so characteristic solely minimally within the drama that follows. Black characters occupy minor roles as servants or nannies (often called “Marthas”), who’re readily sacrificed by June in her child-saving campaign.
June casually causes the execution of the Martha who cares for her first daughter by pestering her to permit her to make contact. The Martha pleads along with her to cease, however June responds along with her regular maternal piety: “You know I can’t stop.” Because the viewers barely is aware of the Martha, their sympathies are directed in the direction of June. Her want to see her daughter is introduced as a professional cause to hazard the lifetime of a black non-mother.
Solely Rita (Amanda Brugel), the Martha assigned to June’s family, has a constant, if marginal, onscreen presence. Rita is a key a part of the resistance motion, however her position as resistance fighter diminishes when June assumes management. As communications professor Meredith Neville-Shepard argues, Rita spends a lot of the later episodes thanking “white saviour” June for facilitating her escape to Canada.
For these causes, though The Handmaid’s Story succeeds as a compelling female-centered drama, not like Atwood’s novel, it foregrounds the rights of organic moms over the difficulty of girls’s reproductive selection. Whereas Atwood criticised compelled impregnation, Hulu’s Handmaid’s story turned more and more invested in an idealised view of white “natural mothers” that’s oppressive to many ladies.
