IN MAY THIS YEAR, PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE released an “unburnable” edition of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. To celebrate, Atwood was filmed taking a blowtorch to the copy, later sold for $40,000, with proceeds going to PEN America. The performance felt surprisingly anti-climactic. What exactly was being non-burned? The novel itself — dark, brilliant, politically slippery — or what it has come to symbolise? A red cape, a TV series, a feminist movement losing its grip on reality. Is anyone really scared of those?
The past five years have seen the clothing styles of Atwood’s 1985 novel achieve iconic status. The election of Donald Trump, followed by the release of the TV adaptation, combined to make the handmaid’s cape, in the words of the Guardian, “one of the most powerful current symbols of feminist protest”.
I am a feminist; I love the novel. Yet I’m sick of the sight of the cape and with it, the idea that Atwood’s work
