Handmaid’s Tale: Everything We Know About How The World Sees Gilead

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In Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale, Gilead is a hyper-religious dystopia that has taken over what used to be the continental United States. The drama series is based on Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, a novel in which women have lost all rights and individual women who are known to be fertile are given to childless upper-class families as Handmaids and forced to become pregnant for them. The Handmaid's Tale adaptation stars Elisabeth Moss as June Osborne, called Offred by the Waterford family to whom she was given. June is a rebellious Handmaid who chronicles her life under the oppressive regime.

Gilead is an autocratic theocracy under an authoritative, extremely regressive Christian rule. Women in Gilead are only useful as wives or breeding stock and are not allowed to own property or have any money of their own. Most of these rules are taken directly from the novel, which Atwood based on real rules and laws that governments and societies around the world have enforced throughout history. Everything in The Handmaid's Tale is something that real women have suffered in the past or are currently experiencing. Gilead culture is reinforced by commanders like Fred Waterford (Joseph Fiennes), and it takes all of the worst oppression that women and girls have faced and applies all of it at once.

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While the television series adaptation mostly focuses on Gilead itself, and specifically the trauma that June experiences at the hands of the Waterfords, there are some instances in Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale where the world's opinion of Gilead is clear. Canada, Gilead's neighbor to the north, doesn't recognize Gilead as a nation of its own and still