The Handmaid's Tale TV Series (2017-2025)
If you are studying The Handmaid's Tale for your A-levels, I think there are some really interesting AO5 points to make about the TV series. So, I thought I'd make an AO5 discussion thread for us to talk about it!
Personally, I loved the TV series, and I highly recommend watching the whole thing! However, if you're using it for AO5, most of the important stuff happens in the first season. You don't have to watch the whole thing because the rest of it goes beyond the novel, so there's not much to compare to the original text.
As always, I'm going to comment my thoughts below about what I noticed about the text! However, I highly recommend you add your own thoughts or something you discussed at school, too! This community can be a great way to organise your revision – if you use the bookmark feature well.
If you need to brush up on what AO5 is and how to talk about it, I recommend checking out my blog post about AO5! It's full of useful information on how to do it well. This version of AO5 would fall under the umbrella of 'Adaptations'.
One of the most interesting changes they made for the TV show has to do with race, in my opinion.
In the original novel, race is very rarely mentioned. That's not because racial issues don't exist! Rather, it's that the world of Gilead is a white supremacist country, and there is no place for black people to exist in their version of America. There is one very quick, passing mention of black people in Chapter Fourteen that shows this: 'Resettlement of the Children of Ham is continuing on schedule'.
This refers to Ham from the Bible, who was the son of Noah (the ark guy). Ham saw Noah naked in his tent when he was drunk one time and gossiped to his other brothers. Ham's brothers went to cover their dad without looking at his nakedness to give him back some dignity. When Noah found out about what Ham had done, he cursed his son, Canaan so that all of his descendents would be slaves forever.
People have attributed black skin to the Curse of Ham for over a thousand years, back in early Medieval times. However, it really took off with the birth of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. People suggested that black people were the descendents of Canaan to justify slavery. The idea is that if Noah cursed Canaan's descendants to be the 'servants of servants', it makes sense that these people were slaves and that they should continue to be because that's how one of God's important people punished their ancestor. So, for them, they found it quite easy to attribute this curse to the black people they were enslaving.
This was then made more explicit in some of the religions in America. For example, in Mormonism, Joseph Smith used to teach that black people were the descendents of the two cursed people in the Bible (Canaan and Cain) and that's why their skin was dark and they were destined to be slaves.
The Handmaid's Tale novel is borrowing this legacy of using the Bible to justify the mistreatment of black people and it says something interesting: Gilead isn't just a deeply misogynistic society. It's also casually racist, and Offred has bought into the white supremacy so much that the plight of black people doesn't really register in her head. In the historical notes in the back of the text (which you should definitely read and use), they add implications that Gilead is a white supremacist world by suggesting that the rise of Gilead was a response to the decline in Caucasian birth rates in particular, not all birth rates. Also, The Testaments makes this more explicit.
I think that makes The Handmaid's Tale a really interesting book to study. It shows the casualness of white supremacy. I mean, it's so easy for Offred as a white woman to not even consider black people or think it's worthy of note what happened to non-white people. She doesn't mention race at all, and that reference comes from a passing snippet of a TV news broadcast, not any actual interest from Offred. Isn't that fascinating? Isn't it interesting how easy it is for Offred to forget about the existence of black and other non-white people? I mean, isn't that what we're all talking about with Friends? How easy it is for white people to gloss over or not even notice the existence of non-white people? For them to see the world from such a position of 'default' that they forget that not everyone looks like them? That in being colour blind, they actually perpetuate racism?
But in the TV series, they chose to make the cast more colour blind. They chose to make Offred's husband be black and their child be biracial. They also chose for Moira to be black.
I think there are a few reasons for this: Atwood has been criticised by some black readers for taking things that really happened to black women (being forced to have babies for white men who use the Bible to justify their abuse) and whitewashing it. By making some of the Handmaids black, they make the experience of handmaids seem more universal.
Also, it does create some interesting extra implications: we know that her marriage to Luke is not considered to be good because she's a second wife, but it does call into question if there are any extra anti-miscegenation reasons for them disliking their marriage. Also, it's interesting that Moira is the person considered too aggressive and not trainable enough to become a handmaid. Her blackness draws attention to the way they so easily dismiss her, yet they're so keen to keep Janine despite her transgressions.
For me, I'm not sure how I feel about this colour blind casting. I think there needs to be much more of an exploration of race in The Handmaid's Tale that Margaret Atwood overlooked, but I don't think that's fixed by just turning some of the white characters into black people.