We need more authors who are willing to stand up to the politically correct establishment.Īnd of course, Atwood’s own claim to fame, The Handmaid’s Tale, is overtly political, with a strong progressive bent. Many of the 20th century’s most significant novels have been explicitly political in nature, including Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. That’s not to say that fiction should never contain political messages.

Modern literature is expected to embrace themes of “social justice,” an expectation now enforced in some cases by “ sensitivity readers,” people hired to review upcoming books and “check for issues of representation, bias, insensitive language, and cultural inaccuracies, and make suggestions to authors.” Indeed, these sensitivity readers make a living telling authors what they should and should not write, pushing authors to become, as Atwood warned, mere mouthpieces for someone else’s agenda. Because that’s just authoritarianism in another form.”Ītwood’s comments come at a time when many writers feel intense pressure to come up with politically correct material. When you start prescribing what authors should write, Atwood says, “it’s game over. because what you’re basically going to get out of that is basically propaganda, or a bunch of writers in exile because they don’t want to be pawns of the state, or they don’t want to be mouthpieces of some of other group. You just have to be very careful about telling artists what they should. When Mic asked her what role “art, and especially writing, can play toward resisting authoritarianism,” Atwood offered a very pointed critique:

One author wrote that Trump’s election means “we’ve got to get really loud these next four years. Many leftists are now encouraging fiction writers to become more politically active.įueled by Trump-induced paranoia, many leftists are now encouraging fiction writers to become more politically active in an effort to prevent our culture from hurtling toward a Gilead-like future. In a recent interview with Mic, Margaret Atwood, author of the popular dystopian novel and Hulu-adapted drama The Handmaid’s Tale, cautioned against comparing the events in her book to contemporary politics.Ĭomparisons between The Handmaid’s Tale and today’s politics became fashionable following the ascension of Donald Trump to the presidency, with many interpreting the Administration’s pro-life measures as the first steps toward the establishment of Gilead, the totalitarian theocracy described in Atwood’s novel.

The handmaid's tale books in order