Isn’t It Relevant That the Star of The Handmaid’s Tale Belongs to a Secretive, Allegedly Oppressive Religion?
“This is a baffling, almost brain-melting answer that gets worse the longer you look at it: playing Offred as a feminist is opposed to playing her as “a wife, a mother, a best friend”? Embracing the story’s “political agenda” means ignoring the elements of it that are about love, survival, and memory? Why couldn’t those things co-exist? (One of the parts of the book that has stayed with me since first reading it as a young teenager is a banal dream Offred has: she’s wearing earrings, and one of them has broken. “Nothing beyond that,” she thinks. “Just the brain going through its back files.” It’s a razor-sharp moment, a reminder of how stubbornly Offred’s old life clings to her, the needles of longing that hit her in the softest, most unexpected places.)
“But this is, frankly, not a surprising show of cognitive dissonance from Moss, who seems like a nice, smart, hardworking person, and who’s stubbornly refused to talk about Scientology, a deeply problematic religion in which she was raised and reportedly remains a member of to this day. As reporter Tony Ortega points out, Moss completed a course called Expanded Grade III in 1999 that would put her, even then, fairly far along the “bridge” of time and money spent in Scientology.”
The Handmaid’s Tale is one of the finest dystopian novels ever written, and it is, inescapably and fundamentally, about women’s oppression under an ultra-conservative regime. The much-anticipated Hulu series based on the book doesn’t shy away from the original subject matter; it couldn’t, really, an…
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