The keyboard was German because I was living in West Berlin, which was still encircled by the Berlin Wall: The Soviet empire was still strongly in place, and was not to crumble for another five years. During my visits to several countries behind the Iron Curtain β Czechoslovakia, East Germany β I experienced the wariness, the feeling of being spied on, the silences, the changes of subject, the oblique ways in which people might convey information, and these had an influence on what I was writing.
So did the repurposed buildings. Having been born in and come to consciousness during World War II, I knew that established orders could vanish overnight. Change could also be as fast as lightning. It seemed to me a risky venture. Was I up to it? The form was strewn with pitfalls, among them a tendency to sermonize, a veering into allegory and a lack of plausibility. If I was to create an imaginary garden I wanted the toads in it to be real. No imaginary gizmos, no imaginary laws, no imaginary atrocities.
God is in the details, they say. So is the Devil. Back in , the main premise seemed β even to me β fairly outrageous. Would I be able to persuade readers that the United States had suffered a coup that had transformed an erstwhile liberal democracy into a literal-minded theocratic dictatorship? In the book, the Constitution and Congress are no longer: The Republic of Gilead is built on a foundation of the 17th-century Puritan roots that have always lain beneath the modern-day America we thought we knew.
The immediate location of the book is Cambridge, Mass. The Secret Service of Gilead is located in the Widener Library, where I had spent many hours in the stacks, researching my New England ancestors as well as the Salem witchcraft trials. Would some people be affronted by the use of the Harvard wall as a display area for the bodies of the executed? They were. In the novel the population is shrinking due to a toxic environment, and the ability to have viable babies is at a premium. Under totalitarianisms β or indeed in any sharply hierarchical society β the ruling class monopolizes valuable things, so the elite of the regime arrange to have fertile females assigned to them as Handmaids.
The biblical precedent is the story of Jacob and his two wives, Rachel and Leah, and their two handmaids. One man, four women, 12 sons β but the handmaids could not claim the sons. They belonged to the respective wives. And so the tale unfolds. Why do we never learn the real name of the central character, I have often been asked. Because, I reply, so many people throughout history have had their names changed, or have simply disappeared from view.
