How The Handmaid's Tale went from vital to irrelevant

The visceral series felt like the definitive social drama of the first Trump presidency. But it’s drifted so far from its source material that it no longer feels important, says Fiona Sturges

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If you want to understand the impact of The Handmaid’s Tale, the TV series adapted from Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel set in the totalitarian Republic of Gilead, look no further than eBay, where you can pick up a handmaid outfit comprising a red cloak and starched white bonnet for around £30. Also available are the dowdy brown dresses worn by Gilead’s aunts, who train and dispense beatings to the handmaids, and the teal cloak worn by Serena Joy, the commander’s wife whom viewers will know as the woman who holds down Elisabeth Moss’s handmaid, June, so she can be raped.

For a while after the series launched in 2017, those red handmaid robes were international symbols of female defiance, showing up in marches in support of women’s reproductive rights in Ireland, Argentina and Trump’s America. Atwood’s imagined world, which arrived on screens as the #MeToo movement was demanding an end to male harassment and abuse, was swiftly absorbed into the lexicon of female oppression, shorthand for what happens when societal and institutional misogyny goes unchecked.

But since then, The Handmaid’s Tale has morphed from an allegory of the fragility of female freedom into a blood-soaked horror show. Little wonder it has also become a staple of Halloween cosplay, the blood-red robes now equivalent to the Ghostface masks from the Scream franchise – ideal for scaring the neighbours.