The Handmaid’s Tale and White Supremacy

A snippet of my YouTube video on the subject. No spoilers.

Margaret Atwood said of her novel, The Handmaid’s Tale:

America was not initially founded as an 18th-century enlightenment republic. It was initially a 17th-century theocracy. That tendency keeps bubbling up in America from time to time.

Atwood’s picture of a post-liberal, theocratic America is strikingly characteristic of our particular shade of fascism here in the States. People say that fascism looks unique in every society and that American fascism has its own special flavor: that is to say very oily and probably pretending to be Italian.

I particularly love the novel’s restricted point of view: it feels old, as though Babatha had slipped her personal diary among the Cave of Letters as she saw the Romans closing in. It makes this narrative feel like a note rolled up into a bottle and thrown out to sea. You can feel the visors the Handmaids wear to restrict their view.

The series, which debuted on Hulu in 2017, can’t restrict point of view in this way. The visual medium of the screen, while opening many storytelling possibilities, removes the intimacy the reader has with Offred’s…