The Handmaid’s Tale is a critically acclaimed, award-winning show on Hulu.
It was adapted from the dystopian novel of the same name by Margaret Atwood, which was published almost 35 years ago.
All adaptations change things, so what are the ways that the book is different from the show? Can these changes be explained by the difference in medium, or do the changes run deeper than that? I will take a look at some of the general differences here, but will leave out specifics, so this will be relatively spoiler-free. Still, if you want to go into either of these completely fresh, this is your very mild spoiler warning.
The first difference I want to note is that the events of the book are covered in the first season of the show, so everything in the second season is added.
That being said, most of the events in the book are quite faithfully recreated in the show, even if the show also added things during that first season.
However, despite so much of the plot being the same or similar, the book and the show have very different feels.
Some of that is owed to the change in medium. The book is told in first person from Offred’s perspective. It is rather stream-of-consciousness and leans into the possibility of Offred being an unreliable narrator.
The show maintains the connections between Offred’s experiences at the Commander’s house, her experiences at the Rachael & Leah Center, and her pre-Gilead experiences through the use of flashbacks, but it does not attempt to recreate the almost free-association feel of those same parts of the book. The show leaves the possibility of an unreliable narrator behind entirely, which is fair, since that is something much harder to do well in visual media than it is in books.
Also, we get more solid character development for the supporting characters in the show, since we are not limited to Offred’s perception of them.
Still, not all of the differences are tied to the change in medium.
One is that the book and the show handle technology differently. In the book, technology is a tool in the hands of the Commanders of Gilead. The television is used as a means of propaganda. But that is based on the ideas of what technology looked like in the eighties. With the show set in an alternate present-day, rather than going through all of the trouble of figuring out how Gilead would use and regulate 21st century technology, they have Gilead lack a lot of communication technology (presumably through intentional suppression on the part of Gilead, though that is never readily addressed). I think that this was a wise change on the part of the showrunners, and the complexity of dealing with modern technology in that situation would have drawn the focus away from the characters, at least somewhat.
Another is that the Commander and Serena Joy are significantly younger in the show than they are in the book. This has a significant effect on their relationships with Offred, as well as how the audience perceives them.
But I consider the changes to the character of Offred to be the most profound changes the show made.
In the book, Offred is mostly just trying to survive. She rebels in small ways to keep her sanity and her humanity, but she is focused on surviving a situation that she can do nothing about. Gilead is seen as unbreakable from Offred’s perspective, and any real resistance is stupid, because it is futile, and it is suicide. Better to keep living and holding out hope that change will come from somewhere else. She doesn’t bring down Gilead; she doesn’t try to bring down Gilead.
This ties the book closely to classic dystopias, where the protagonists are often not heroes, and the best they can hope for is some kind of personal victory, and often not even that.
Offred of the show is different, more defiant. She also wants to survive, but she is more willing to risk everything to defy this unjust society.
In this way, the show takes on the tone of more modern dystopias, where the protagonists are heroes stiking blows against the totalitarian government. And this tone difference only increases as the show goes on and moves further and further from the original source material.
Now, I like both kinds of dystopian works, but I would guess that this difference between the book and the show will be the cause of the most people liking one version, but not the other (with the possible exception of people who view the show first, then cannot get into the stream-of-consciousness writing style in the book).
All in all, I would definitely consider the show worth watching and the book worth reading. Just know that if you’ve loved one and want to try the other, there is that tonal shift.
Anyway, what do you think of the book? The show? The differences between the two? Let me know in the comments down below!
