At some time during the writing, the novel’s name changed to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” partly in honor of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,”<br />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.<br />So many different strands fed into “The Handmaid’s Tale” — group executions, sumptuary laws, book burnings, the Lebensborn program of the SS<br />and the child-stealing of the Argentine generals, the history of slavery, the history of American polygamy .<br />If you mean a novel in which women are human beings — with all the variety of character and behavior<br />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.<br />Margaret Atwood on What ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Means in the Age of Trump -<br />By MARGARET ATWOODMARCH 10, 2017<br />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<br />yellow legal notepads, then transcribed my almost illegible scrawlings using a huge German-keyboard manual typewriter I’d rented.<br />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<br />but who are not always as empathetic as one might wish; and the individual reader of the book at any given time.<br />This name is composed of a man’s first name, “Fred,”<br />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.
