The Irony of Censorship: Why Banning The Handmaid’s Tale Is the Ultimate Sign That the Dystopia Is Already Here
Margaret Atwood is no stranger to book banning. According to the American Library Association, her 1985 masterpiece The Handmaid’s Tale was ranked among the top 30 most banned books of the 2010s. As the assessment for the 2020s looms, experts expect it to rank even higher. Society has arguably never been closer to the patriarchal dystopia Atwood imagined 41 years ago than it is now. In the eyes of critics, those who wish to see the dark tenets of Gilead realized have heavily penetrated political structures and find backing from modern, birth-rate-obsessed billionaires. In their view, women are reduced to vessels meant to bear genetically pure babies, making The Handmaid’s Tale a dangerous warning they want to hide.
1. A Warning Treated Like a Blueprint
The real reason the political right heavily organizes to pull The Handmaid’s Tale from school libraries and public shelves isn’t actually about “protecting children” from vulgarity—it’s because the book acts as an uncomfortably sharp mirror. Atwood famously noted that she never invented a single horror in the book; every form of oppression, from reproductive servitude to stripping women of financial rights, has already happened in human history.
By challenging the text under the guise of censoring “explicit content,” political pressure groups are trying to hide the warning signs of creeping authoritarianism. When a government begins to mandate what people can read, it is executing the exact first step Gilead took to consolidate absolute power.
2. Margaret Atwood’s Savage Counter-Attack: The Unburnable Book
How does a legendary author react when a powerful system tries to erase her voice? She doesn’t back down; she weaponizes irony. To mock the absurdity of censors, Margaret Atwood teamed up with her publisher to create a special, completely “unburnable” edition of The Handmaid’s Tale.
Printed on fireproof materials, Atwood literally tested the prototype herself on camera with a flamethrower, smiling as the pages refused to ignite. It was a brilliant, defiant message to modern bigots: You can ban my words from the shelves, but you cannot destroy the truth, and you cannot stop it from going underground into the hands of those who search for it.