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Speaking about prose to Linda Sandler, Margaret Atwood postulates, "A Novel is something you see and the primary focus of interest is people" (Conversations Series). She describes herself as a "bemused sometimes disheartened observer of society". In her address at the Amnesty International meeting in 1981, Atwood comments on the perception of the artists craft, "we are not good at analyzing it in terms of his politics and by and large we do not do so," (Fraser 170), inviting a political reading of her text. The Handmaid's Tale is a dark dystopic novel depicting the America of the 1990s, transformed into a totalitarian theocracy called the Republic of Gilead. In creating this feminist dystopia, Atwood employs distortion rather than direct attack to critique. Utopias are not imagined as conclaves which are enclosed regulated and rationalized systems, but rather as progressive processes of relationships between human beings. The Handmaid's Tale presents a distortion of all utopic impulses. We accost, in the nightmarish world of the Gilead, human beings whose marginality in gender, race, class and economic power renders them a 'non subject' in terms of the dominant social formation.