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In The Handmaid ’s Tale Atwood questions why people so often cooperate with totalitarian regimes, and she draws on the history of the Third Reich to demonstrate that visual culture can help create a climate that suggests that resistance to the regime is futile.

Atwood reveals the danger of using visual culture to create a "glossy surface image" (Chow 24) that simplifies complex ideologies and social relationships, and she suggests that individuals can resist visual manipulation by learning to "read beneath" images (Handmaid’s 105).

Fascist Style in Gilead

language of "protection of women" could slip from a demand for more freedom into a retreat from freedom, to a kind of neo-Victorianism.

The language is feminist, but the result can be deeply patriarchal, as in this novel

Without some sense of the varying agendas of mid-20th-century feminists and the debates among those agendas this novel will not make much sense. Women who participated in the movement from the late sixties and early seventies responded to this novel strongly, often finding it extremely alarming. Younger women lacking the same background often found it baffling. Ask yourself as you read not whether events such as it depict s are likely to take place, but whether the attitudes and values it conveys are present in today's society.