The Handmaid’s Tale (Visually) Retold

Abstract

Owing largely to the political situation in the United States, which seems to head,
dangerously so, towards a dystopian Gilead, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s
Tale gets, at the end of the 2010s, to be re-told by many voices: that of her original
creator – by her writing a sequel, The Testaments (2019) –, but also those assumed in
successful transmedial adaptations – the homonymous graphic novel authored by Renee
Nault (2019) and the TV series that has taken Offred beyond her final step “into the
darkness within, or else the light” (Atwood 2010: 307) into the second, third and fourth
seasons. Aside from Season 1, which follows closely the convoluted structure of Offred’s
monological testimony, the TV series seems, at a glance, less a multimodal adaptation
and more an appropriation of a late 20th-century novel that has become a political and
cultural phenomenon. Part of a project concerned with the many re-tellings of The
Handmaid’s Tale, this paper aims to analyse the TV series’ fabric beyond the plot
departures from its hypotext, as well as the latter’s ‘translations’, with a view to
proving its unquestionable indebtedness to the ‘mistressmind’ of contemporary
speculative fiction.