Transferring Handmaids: Iconography, Adaptation, and Intermediality

Abstract

This chapter examines the intermedial transfer of Handmaid iconography across platforms and contexts, and the mechanisms that facilitate such movement. The author begins with a consideration of the intermedial network established within Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale to show that, even prior to adaptation, the Handmaid is understood as a product of intermedial transfer. The author then surveys the movement of Handmaid iconography in a variety of print- and motion-based media, such as book cover design, illustration, graphic novel, ballet, film, and television, and also in more generalized spheres. The image of the Handmaid transfers through processes of adaptation that interpret visual markers in distinct modalities, each of which emphasizes particular traits or characteristics over others. The emphasis or disclosure that characterizes each iteration is accompanied by concealment; that is, as an adaptation foregrounds one particular modality, it simultaneously represses another. This tension between disclosing and concealing operates thematically and in terms of its foregrounded media.