As a lover of literature, I find it super irritating when dystopian fiction starts to feel familiar.
As a dutiful, slightly over-serious Wits student, I first encountered Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in a Women’s Fiction module — the sort of course that encourages you to read with indignation ... and a highlighter. At the time, it felt safely theoretical: a clever, chilling thought experiment, admirable for its architecture, not its accuracy.
Then I listened to a couple of Atwood interviews in which she insisted that nothing in her dystopia was invented — just camouflaged by her fictional style. So, revisiting The Handmaid’s Tale, or its equally unsettling sequel, The Testaments, is even more disconcerting now. These stories aren’t just warnings of what might be, they draw on what has been — and, in some places in the world, what still is.
The television adaptation, with Elisabeth Moss as its long-suffering though aptly rebellious heroine, made the horror of the situations, in which some humans are forced to exist, feel intimate. The ritualised violations — bureaucratised, sanitised, repeated — are almost unbearable to watch, and worse, because I now know that these things actually happen.
Gilead, that grim theocracy where women are stripped of literacy, autonomy and identity, forbidden to read, work or own anything, never was fiction after all - just a historical echo. The novel’s harshest elements have precedent. Forced pregnancy, state-sanctioned sexual violence, the reduction of women to reproductive vessels are documented realities — from Cambodia under Pol Pot to conflicts in Rwanda and the Balkans, from the brutalities of slavery to the atrocities inflicted on Yazidi women.
The Testaments, with its suggestion of resistance — of systems cracking under their own moral weight — feels a little more hopeful. Even terrible Aunt Lydia, played brilliantly by Ann Dowd, a founding Aunt of Gilead, offers some resistance to the oppressive regime. Dystopian fiction in Atwood’s hands is more accurate a mirror of our complex reality than the opposite, Utopia.
Into this layered reflection steps Chase Infiniti, playing Agnes Jemima, part of a new generation in Gilead. In our interview this week, Infiniti emerges as grounded and formidable. Her performance leans into psychological nuance; small hesitations, coded silences, flickers of resistance that suggest inner lives refusing to be co-opted. It’s a hopeful reminder that even in systems designed to erase individuality, the rebellious humans in us always persist.
