The Patriarchal Worlds of Handmaid's Tale and "Orphan Black"

I started thinking about connections to The Handmaid’s Tale back in the second season of “Orphan Black.” Now that Atwood’s novel has also been turned into a TV show, I’m finally getting around to writing about them. While the worlds created by Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale and by John Fawcett and Graeme Manson in “Orphan Black” are quite different in important ways, they both develop crucial feminist ideas about women’s lack of control over key areas of their lives, bodies, and reproduction AND how solidarity among similarly concerned women and men is crucial to resist oppressive systems—whether religious, governmental, or corporate.

At first glance, the society of “Orphan Black” (presumably an unnamed part of Canada) is a modern, free democracy. Citizens have choice of career, movement, free-time engagements. Aside from all looking like Tatiana Maslany, the clones are about as different from each other as can be: cop, thief/con artist, scientist, alcoholic housewife, crazy Eastern European woman who was brutally oppressed but that’s what happens over there, right? There is movement between countries—Cosima comes from the U.S. to study, Siobhan and her foster kids come from the U.K. and periodically head back for a visit, people come and go as they please. The world offers a range of down-time activities from the kinds of things people in our world do: clubbing, creating art, taking drugs, running for school board, dating, to the (as of yet) scientifically impossible, like modifying their bodies to grow tails. The travel is expansive, the drugs can be expansive, the science seems expansive.

In contrast, Gilead is an ever-shrinking and restrictive world. Borders are closed, women can only leave their houses in pairs that function as a mutual spying system, and government-imposed roles involve no choices in job or leisure activities. It is a claustrophobic world, in which the state (and the religion that governs it) is all-powerful. In “Orphan Black,” we hear very little about the state as a whole; we only see—and the characters experience—it through the police and the military. There is a fundamentalist religious force in the Proletheans and the cruel nuns of Helena’s childhood, but it is at odds with the other societal force: corporate science.

Yet, in both worlds, the power structures (religion and state in Handmaid’s Tale and corporate science and religion in “Orphan Black”) have similar goals that drive the stories: severely constrict women’s human rights in order to further the power structures’ agendas. And, in both worlds, those who in free circumstances would likely never come together do so to form bonds forged by their oppressors, in order to resist and stand up for themselves and others.

The fight for the power to control human reproduction is at the center of both of these stories. In The Handmaid’s Tale, environmental degradation and pollution have caused mass insterility amongst the population of the United States. In order to ensure a continuation of the human species, the fundamentalist Christian men who took over the government coerce fertile women into the service of the state as Handmaids—slaves of the powerful Commanders—whose sole purpose in life is to bear children that will be taken from them and raised by the elite families. Offred and her peers in Gilead are nothing more than red-robed wombs. To give the enterprise a veneer of sanctity, the regime creates a Ceremony based upon a story from the book of Genesis. The Ceremony involves the monthly ritual rape of the Handmaids by the Commanders and binds the threesome of Commander, Wife, and Handmaid together under the Commander’s unquestionable masculine power, supposedly sanctioned by their god.

In the world of “Orphan Black,” scientists—led at first by P.T. Westmoreland—desire to appropriate for themselves the power to create human life. Their experiments finally lead to the successful cloning of a line of females (Project Leda) and a line of males for military use (Project Castor). The females were bred to be infertile, but twins Sarah and Helena were anomalies, so further experimentation is done on them and on Kira—Sarah’s daughter. Those in power wanted the Leda clones to be un-self-aware. They were to think of themselves as free beings with choices, but in actuality were constantly monitored in secret by people they trust—often lovers or parental figures. Their lives are designed by and meant to be subservient to unethical scientists and corporations, who are in the work for glory and /or profit. Religious groups both demonize and seek to reproduce the clones, in both cases being cruel. In the first instance, Tomas and those around him unleash the fury of their judgmental god on the young Helena, creating an assassin to kill other clones. The Proletheans led by Henrik, on the other hand, believe that “religion without science is blind.” Henrik uses science to make himself into a god, a creator. The results—seen in Season Two--are a whole nursery full of scientifically manufactured children, Helena kidnapped and her eggs stolen, and his own daughter and Helena impregnated with his and Helena’s embryos. The harvesting of Helena’s eggs—a form of rape--occurs after a strange ritual binding Henrik and Helena in a kind of faux marriage.

The similarities between Atwood’s work and Fawcett/Manson’s is most obvious here. The women at the Prolethean compound, like the Handmaids, have no meaningful choice and are made to believe it is their “purpose” just to bear children for the community, to be “brood mares,” as Gracie calls them. In both stories’ worlds, all of this ritualized reproductive activity is in obedience to a religious vision that would control women and coerce participation in expanding and protecting the world. Religion, corporations, and the government have interests in female subservience and in forced reproduction (or lack of it). In both worlds, the corporate, religious, and state powers are thoroughly corrupted. Dr. Leakey, Ferdinand, Henrik, Tomas, Commander Waterford and other Commanders use their power solely to further their own agendas, with no consideration for the women whose lives they exploit.

But, both stories also demonstrate how patriarchal oppression is not just an enterprise of men controlling women. Some women are brought in, offered some power, and made complicit, but then become angry when restrictions are also put onto them: Susan and Rachel Duncan, Virginia Coady, Serena Joy, Aunt Lydia all become unhappy when they realize that they are not to be equal to the men, that they too will be controlled and minimized by the men in power, even though they gave their services in collusion with the women-suppressing regimes.

Finally—for now—we see that in both worlds, resistance happens when women whom the powers-that-be have created as a group, despite them having little in common (Handmaids, Clones), join forces with sympathetic males (Felix, Donny, Scott, Cal, Art in “Orphan Black”; Nick and the TV show’s Luke in Handmaid’s Tale). Gender essentialism is shown to be a false philosophy, regardless of how much value those in power place in it. It is those who support women’s right to self-determination and their right to fight for each other—regardless of their gender—who are on the same side, fighting those who believe in the right of those in powerful positions (male or female) to dominate and control the bodies of the women in their spheres of influence.

“Orphan Black” will be over in a month. I look forward to seeing how the Clones all fare and compare to the Handmaids.