From Irony to Affiliation in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

Since its publication in the mid-l980s, some readers have objected to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale on political grounds. One version of this objection asserts that the novel is not simply dystopian but antiutopian in that the novel’s ironized ending, the “Historical Notes,” shortcircuits any hope for political effectiveness that Offred’s open-ended conclusion might hold out.