Threaded Histories

Intertextual Allusion and Recycled Oppression in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)

In The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood constructs a dystopian future that feels disturbingly familiar, not because of its speculative government or setting, but because of its deep intertextual resonance with real-world histories of religious control, war, and gender-based oppression. Building on the idea of intertextuality, defined by James E. Porter as “looking for ‘traces,’ the bits and pieces of Text which writers or speakers borrow and sew together to create new discourse” (Porter 34), Atwood’s novel relies on allusion to invoke the memory of prior regimes, theological traditions, and historical injustices.¹ Through these intertextual echoes, The Handmaid’s Tale becomes more than a fictional warning, it’s a rhetorical patchwork of rebranded repression that functions as a vibrant, contemporary entry within the discourse community of dystopian literature. “A discourse community shares assumptions about what objects are appropriate for examination and discussion,” (Porter 39). Commo…