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Explanation and Analysis:
The Handmaid's Tale is speculative fiction/dystopian writing. Like her contemporaries (i.e., Ursula K. Le Guin), Atwood uses speculative writing as a form of political commentary on modern problems. The Handmaid's Tale is a kind of thought experiment: what would happen if these values in American culture were taken to their furthest extreme? What would a Christian theocracy in America look like?
In The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood also continues discussion on an important topic within dystopian fiction: biopolitics, or the relationship between power and biology, between state entities and physical bodies. Writers of speculative fiction have often engaged with such themes, particularly in the modern and postmodern literary eras. Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, H.G. Wells, and other novelists laid the groundwork for The Handmaid's Tale. Due to the nature of its themes and commentary on body/biopolitics, The Handmaid's Tale is also an important work within the genre of feminist literature, exploring the exertion of religious power over bodies of all genders.
The ethos of The Handmaid's Tale is, in fact, the very ethos of dystopian fiction: being, of course, the idea that imagination opens up pathways to freedom and potential. Through dystopian fiction, one explores alternative realities as a way to contend with real-world problems. Offred, similarly, must retreat into her imagination as a means of escape.
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