The Testaments, now streaming on Disney+, has big shoes to fill. It arrives in a post-MeToo media landscape still shaped by the seismic impact of Margaret Atwood’s previous adaptation, The Handmaid’s Tale. Released in 2017, The Handmaid’s Tale quickly transcended its source material to become a feminist touchstone, inspiring a vivid visual and cultural language of resistance across politics, performance, music and the arts.
In Atwood’s world of Gilead, women are reduced to archetypes within a patriarchal rape culture: complicit, privileged wives; submissive house servants known as “Marthas”; or the Handmaids themselves, stripped to mere breeding stock for the regime.
As life in the US seemed eerily to catch up with Atwood’s vision, the hallmark red dress, white cap and down-turned gaze of the handmaids became iconic. For protesters, it provided a graphic symbol of the fate awaiting women in a world where the president has described himself as the “fertilisation president” “protecting” women whether they “like it or not”.
