The Handmaid’s Tale

Margaret Atwood
 Introduction
• It is considered to be a text that takes over where 1984 left off!! [It came out
in 1984]
• It’s a dystopian fiction: physical and spiritual oppression; media manipulation
and the control of human thought as necessary governing mechanisms of society.
• It has been labeled: anti-utopia, dystopia, cautionary tale, political satire,
allegory, spiritual autobiography, feminist speculative fiction, futurist fable.
• The term ‘Utopia’ is problematic:

‘eu’ the good place and ‘ou-topos’ no place.

So utopia is good place and a non existent place!!

Does it mean any society that strives for perfection is doomed inevitably to fail??
 A prototypical Utopian location: these societies are frozen and
separated from the chaotic and irrational reality by physical barriers
such as walls, water or by the metaphysical barriers of space and time.

Since, perfection cannot be improved upon, a utopia has evolved to its

fullest potential; it is simply incapable of bettering itself. The society is
just suspended in space and time, it is also suspended in its own history
and development. Marked by ‘homeostasis’ [ geometric precision,
single structure, mechanized, sanitized efficiency]

Characters lack substance and motivation

Plot of such a work is infused with political commentary; narrator
functions as our tour guide, moving us through the encounter, controlling
what we see and hear; much like a visitor’s perceptions are being shaped
by the native and the native is being controlled by author.

The tendency of utopian writing avoids any historical development,

internal conflict, movement of time and space and round fully developed
characters.
A shift was witnessed: an attempt to modify the utopian idea, creating
dystopias or anti-utopias, using satire to ridicule and parody

However, these works are deadly serious about transforming the utopian
dream into nightmare. Exploring the dangers that are to be found in the
pursuit of perfection.

Central fear of a dystopian narrative is invasion of technology and

mechanical progress.

‘Artificial intelligence research, genetic engineering, life- prolonging

machines, the abortion controversy, and the self-styled scientific
creationism movement all present immediate practical challenges to our
conception of what human being is’ (Keith Hall)
Dystopian texts are not predicting future. These are to be read as ‘correct
guesses’ based on life time of political writing, or engaged with urgent
concerns of contemporary time.

We encounter flat characters (here too). This a world where individuality

has become obsolete; ‘it’s a world in which the self, whatever
subterranean existence it manages to eke out, is no longer a significant
value, not even a value to be violated’ (Irving Howe)
 Context
• America is the ‘Land of the Free’ and Canada is its lesser cousin,
marginalized status.

The book attempts to reread from ‘geopolitical perspective within the

dominant sphere of US and also the colonized sphere from the margins’
(Frances Bartkowski)

The dominant image of Canadian fiction is survival, ‘un-heroic survival

of victimisation’ (Atwood)

In the book Canada establishes “Underground Female-road”(used by

handmaids escape Gilead) much like Underground railroad
 The founding Puritans had wanted their society to be a theocratic
utopia, a city upon a hill, to be a model and a shining example to all
nations. The split between the dream and reality is an old one and it has
not gone away.

Canada suffers from no such split, it was founded not by idealists but by
people who had been kicked out by other places.

America is a tragic country because it has great democratic ideals and

rigid social machinery . . . Our [Canadian] constitution promises ‘peace,
order, and good government’ [this clause/statute is part of number of
commonwealth countries] and that’s quite different from ‘life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness’ [American]
This suggests deeper fissures than the Puritans appearance/reality split:
the unbridgeable gap between the ideal of individual liberty and the
ideal of social order.

“it can’t happen here” assertions made by Atwood’s American friends

propelled her to write the story. For Atwood the nightmare of her
relative ‘the half hanged Mary’ is proof not only that a brutal totalitarian
takeover could happen here but that it has.

The form that repression takes is invariably a reversion to the original

ethos of the nation. Were it to happen in America, the theocratic
ambitions of the New England Puritans who tortured and hanged
inconvenient women would provide the most obvious model.
• Mary Webster 1683

Accused of witchcraft in Massachusetts for having provoked a righteous

gentleman to become ‘valetudinarious’ (weak or sickly condition). Mary
was found guilty, strung up to a tree and left overnight to die. But, in the
morning she was discovered to be alive!! Ultimately in history she came
to be known “half-hung Mary”

Webster family moved to Nova Scotia, Canada. Webster was a distant

relative of Margaret Atwood’s on the maternal side.

“ She is my favourite ancestor. . . And if there is one thing I hope I’ve

inherited from her, its her neck” (Atwood)
Prof Perry Miller, Harvard Professor
• He introduced to Atwood the fiery sermons of Cotton Mather (Mather
wrote to one of the judges, John Richards, a member of his congregation, expressing
his support of the prosecutions, but cautioning; "do not lay more stress on pure 
spectral evidence than it will bear … It is very certain that the Devils have
sometimes represented the Shapes of persons not only innocent, but also very
virtuous. Though I believe that the just God then ordinarily provides a way for the
speedy vindication of the persons thus abused.”

•  He set her curiosity rolling on the uses of history.

 The novel is a dystopian vision of a future in which Christian
fundamentalists have executed the President, machine gunned the
Congress (blaming the assassinations on Muslim Fanatics), suspended
the constitution, and created a new social order in which women are at
best, commodities.
 Narrative
• The Biblical Quote opens the book.

The first quotation is from the first book of the Bible, Genesis,

describing how the infertile Rachel told her husband Jacob to
have intercourse with her handmaid. This is the biblical
justification for the rulers in Atwood's fictional state, Gilead, to use
the women they call ‘Handmaids' to bear children in a society
where, for a variety of reasons, infertility and genetic deformities
are prevalent.
• The second quotation points the reader to Jonathan Swift's A
Modest Proposal - a deeply ironic work (published in 1729)
which attacks the cruelty and selfishness of the
wealthy English and their treatment of the starving Irish. Swift
pretends to offer as a serious answer to food shortages the
proposition that those Irish who cannot feed their children
should eat them. His shocking satire makes his readers see
their contemporary situation in a new light. The reference by
Atwood to Swift's work is an indication to her readers that her
purposes are also satirical and that she wants them to look
with a new, more critical eye at late twentieth-century society.
• The third quotation of a Sufi proverb – ‘In the desert there is no sign that
says, Thou shalt not eat stones' - is more open to interpretation:

A possible meaning is that in the desert there is nothing to eat except stones,
but no-one wants to eat them, for they cannot sustain life. In other words, there
is no point in prohibiting something that no-one wants to do anyway

It could also mean - live with what you have, however terrible or life destroying
it is.
• In Gilead, so many things are prohibited, and people have little chance of
doing what is prohibited - they live in ‘reduced circumstances' - but the
human instinct for survival needs no direction. Rigorous tyrannies such as
Gilead purport to know what is good for society, but human freedom is more
important.

•  
• Republic of Gilead, appears to be in future

• Based on Judeo-Christian Scripture, source of all laws and customs.

(Old Testament);
• Names are from the Bible: Guards are Angels, Soldiers are Angels of
Apocalypse and Angels of Light, training center where handmaids are
indoctrinated are called Rachel and Leah Center, stores are called Milk
and Honey, All Flesh and Cars are called Chariots, whirlwinds.
• Money has been replaced by compubank; newspapers have been
banned; atomic power plants have exploded on San Andrea fault;
pollution and toxic waste have so poisoned the populace that many
men are sterile, and should a woman manage to conceive, the chances
of delivering a normal baby are one in four.
We meet Offred, who narrates the story, describes the society and covers
the society she lived in before Gilead and after the revolution.

The chapters are titled: Night, Shopping, Night, Waiting Room, Nap
Night, Household Night .. . Historical Notes.

The story is the story of a story!!

Its Fiction and reconstruction of her/history

• The reasons for the telling remain obscure: perhaps as an appeal for
help from other countries, as a testimonial for history, as a way to pass
the time in hiding... The narrator makes use of this story-telling
opportunity to make sense out of the antithetic worlds of her life: the
United States she came into at birth which was reeling from the effects
of the women's liberation movement, including the backlash of the
religious right, and the Gilead she was catapulted into by a return-to-
traditional-values insurrection. The narrator has difficulty reconciling
the events of Gilead and of her pre-Gileadean life; if one is fact the
other must be fiction. In her simultaneous relating and denial of events
she leaves room for doubt as to whether her story2 is a faithful
reconstruction, or whether she is constructing, once more, a story1.
• If it's only a story, it becomes less frightening. (p. 154)
• I am trying not to tell stories, or at any rate not this one. (p. 60)
• I don't want to be telling this story. (p. 237, 285)
I don't have to tell it. (p. 237)
• Stories must be told to someone and the form of the story
depends on who it is told to.
• Offred recognizes this, “You don't tell a story only to
yourself. There's always someone else. Even when there is
no one,”(p. 49). “Because I'm telling you this story I will
your existence. I tell, therefore you are” (p. 279).
• She realizes that she may only be imagining a friendly
listener, “I'll pretend you can hear me. But it's no good,
because I know you can’t” (p. 50). “A story is like a
letter. Dear You, I'll say. Just you, without a name” (p. 50),
just as Offred has lost her real name. Because she is
telling the story at least partially for herself, “you” is also
her mirror image, who will hopefully reflect back a clear
picture of the puzzle pieces of her life. Hearing her
story voiced, it becomes a story that might be analyzed
sensibly. This narratee is the friend “it's hard to imagine,
now” (p. 35), whose role is to help her to find answers to
the “Steel question marks... set into the brickwork of the
wall” p. 42). even as she resists the telling, “I don't have to
tell anything, to myself or to anyone else” (p. 237)
• Three times of reference can be distinguished: 1) the time of the story
in Gilead, 2) a time before Gilead and 3) the time of the narration.
• The story is related in both, clearly delineating the time of the
narration from the time of the event being described, and in the
narrative present, whereby Offred seemingly “step(s) sideways out
of... Time” to ‘go’ (p. 47) to the scene of the events. Offred situates
and recounts them clearly and concisely, making them as real as they
had been. Having returned to these events, she can relive her feelings
questioning and commenting on what is happening, remaining just this
side of passing judgment as she gropes for knowledge, “I would like to
know...whatever there is to know... what’s going on” (p. 198). The
final judgement is left to the narratee.
• The text apocalyptically foresees failure of humanism, liberalism,
individualism, feminism, and capitalism. (Kaufman)
• Women are stripped of all constitutional rights: their bank accounts are
cancelled, and they lose their right to work, to own property, and to
vote.
• Gilead shifts the relation between sexes towards inequality, imbalance
and possession. As Offred says, “We are not each other’s anymore.
Instead, I am his.”
• The male monopoly on literacy ensures that women are not only
invisible in the dystopia but are effectively silenced too.
• Ellipses and analepsis, narrative disruptions, gaps, and non-
chronological fragments
• The non-linear narrative form, the personal first person narration of
Offred, who recounts her story, therefore defies the patri-linearity
Gilead superimposes on the content level, and this structure
deconstructs Gilead’s monolithic truth.
• Appended to novel are the “Historical Notes’

Academic Symposium on Gileadean Studies in 2195.

• Appended to novel are the “Historical Notes’

Academic Symposium on Gileadean Studies in 2195.

Offred’s story is recollection; an oral text on audiocassettes.

The story we read, is filtered, not an authentic text.

Professor Piexoto tires to construct: one history, one objective and

therefore one reality. In contrast to Offred’s fragmented narrative.

The title The Handmaid’s Tale is also sexist: tale or tail?

• The professors have transcribed and rearranged Offred’s subjective
oral story, turning her-story into his-story.
• Piexoto, the keynote speaker makes sexist jokes,

• Downplays Gilead’s sexist and totalitarian politics and refuses to pass

judgment. “Our job is not to censure but to understand”; he expresses
affinity with Gilead’s misogynist system: “its genius was synthesis”
• He marginalizes and trivializes Offred’s story by wishing “twenty
pages or so of print out from Waterfords [the Commander’s] private
computer”
• He condescendingly apologizes for Offred’s bad style and muddled
mind.
• The historical notes complete the frame, describes official male discourse.

The sexist dystopia continues: once more women are dehumanized and belittled and
Offred’d life is reduced to academic question.

He attempts “to analyze history on the basis of male biography and thereby mutes
the woman’s voice.” (P. Murphy)

The narrative de-familiarizes ‘us’/ ‘self’ by taking away the familiarity of everyday.

Fiction, reality, history and Biblical history mingle.

 Themes
• STORY TELLING:

Offred, engaging narrator, she tells a survivor’s tale.

“ its storytelling at its most drastic . . . The story of the disaster which is
the world; it is done by Job’s messenger whom God saved alive because
someone had to tell the story. I only am escaped alone to tell thee. When
a story, “true” or not, begins like this, we must listen.” (Atwood)
Offred’s stories are for her remembered identity; she invokes other
characters too, inside and outside the text.

Stories help her to gain psychological balance and sanity from imagined
doppelgangers and alter-egos.

Imprisoned in Gilead, Offred creates another voice, with her narration:

this is Offred’s act of defiance, rebellion.

Gilead desires women’s silence and absence; but Offred’s narration is a

form of verbal rebellion: the audacity to acquire a narrative voice; to
disrespect, contest and decenter the official, public patriarchal discourse;
it offers secret subtext of her own, private and individual story.
Narrative resistance replaces physical heroism.

In opposition to Gilead’s singularity, hierarchical discourse, Offred

creates a polysemous discourse, a plurality, a polyphony of voices.

These voices are filtered through her consciousness because of her

constant awareness of alternative points of view and of reality in the
plural.

She gives us perspectives: of the past, of the present, of male and female
voices, of Gilead’s patriarchal mind set and her mother and Moira’s
feminist views.
• Feminists are particularly interested in stories, because as
a marginal group of society women have often been
objects rather than the creators of narrative. People on the
margin of societies often find they are denied access to
discourses that confer power and status. (Karen F. Stein)
• LANGUAGE TRUTH AND DISCOURSE

Gilead Discourse

Two devices to control women: Language and action.

Interpretations, opinions, actions and statements must be within the field

of what the fundamental truth of values of that discourse is. “Each
society has its regime of truth. Its general politics of truth”

That is the type of discourse it accepts and functions as true, the

mechanism and instances that enable one to distinguish between true and
false statements.

(Foucault)
Even the unspoken or unofficial truths are part of discourse.

Everything that is formulated in discourse was already articulated in a

semi silence that precedes it.

“This ‘not-said’ is a hollow that undermines from within all that is said”
(Foucault)

The society before Gilead was not free from the ideas and values
displayed in Gilead but were incubated in the discourse.

The values of Gilead are grounded in the society “before”. Offred’s

narrative contains remnants of society before and the framework of
Gilead discourse.
Her truth depends on both the truths of Gilead and the society before.

“I remember walking in the art galleries, through the nineteenth century:

the obsession they had with harem . . . Studies of sedentary flesh painted
by men”

It shows that the way she lived her life contributed to Gilead. She
reassesses her individualist positions.
Knowledge: the one who is in control of knowledge is in control of
power, and controls what can be said and claimed.

Private encounters with Commander: What would you like?

What she really wants is knowledge; keeping people in ignorance is an

important device to keep women with the discourse of Gilead.
Women in Gilead

Rules of discourse are maintained uncritically because of the severe

punishments.

Gilead is a society built on male dominance there are plenty of women

who help maintain that system.

Men are rulers; some women have limited power and most women are
controlled and have no power. ‘Aunts’ are in charge of re-education of
the women who are handmaids. Regime uses women to oppress
women. Serena Joy, used to make speeches about the sanctity of home
and ironically now she’s become speechless.
She had the power to express herself and she used it to
undermine that very power, she’s now bitter.

“ She doesn’t make speeches anymore. She has become

speechless. She stay in her home, but it doesn’t seem to
agree with her. How furious she must be, now that she’s
taken at her word.”

Serena does not believe in the laws of Gilead: suggests

Offred meets Nick to become pregnant.
The regime strips women of identity and the power of that
identity: Ofred, Ofglen

It would be easier for next generation of Handmaids since

they will not have any memory of another way of living.

The regime devalues women by claiming that the failure of

producing children was only a woman’s failure not a man’s.
A woman’s value is determined by the ability to produce a
baby.
No discourse can be created from nothing.

One cannot simply create ‘truth’; truth must be justified in

relation to conditions of ‘previous’ truths.

The regime’s goal is a Christian society and they take

advantage of the negative aspects of society before to justify
Gilead.

Women now have static freedom; they have the freedom not
to be negatively affected by Men’s dynamic freedom.
Commander justifies the oppressive regime, which he partly
masterminded with the observation that in the old society men felt they
were no longer needed by women.

Women could now fulfill their biological destiny.

Gilead has, ‘All human qualities are instrumentalized and reduced to

quantitative values of exchange. In other words the new rulers equate the
value of something and someone solely with validity, usefulness,
functionality, economic profit’ (Hammer)

The only two societies where Offred has lived are where women are
oppressed be it by means of sexual violence, language, Knowledge or
power.
• ANATOMY IS DESTINY

• Every woman in the text is defined and regulated in terms of her

ability and willingness to bear children.

“There is no such thing as sterile men anymore, not officially. There are
only women who are fruitful and women who are barren, that’s the law.”

Unwomen to colonies

Econowives take the role of Marthas and Handmaids

Jezebel Club

All categories deny women: individuality, intelligence, creativity,

humour, strength.
The conflicting images of Offred:

Is she still a daughter if her mother has been erased from the record/ Is
she still a wife if her husband is gone? Is she still a mother if her
daughter is dead? Is she a whore because of what she signed up for? Is
she even a woman since she is only one step away from being declared
an ‘Unwoman’? Is she a human being at all since she no longer has
freedom or her own name?
• Offred’s sense of self is defined by her culture as residing solely in her
female body and its capacity for reproduction, and where her body is
located within a system of technological surveillance
• Duality

The double story appended to the novel, ‘Historical Notes’,

organised at Nunavit on June 25, 2195. Gilead is deep in
past, illusory; a lost civilization.

It is both future and history, like the word Utopia : a perfect

world and nowhere. Gilead is neither here nor there but two
places at once; the events of the novel take place outside of
time.
• Offred speculates about the nature of time:

I lie then, inside the room, under the plaster eye in the ceiling behind the
white curtains, between the sheets, neatly as they, and step sideways out
of my own time. Out of time. Though this is the time, nor am I out of it.

Offred is in no-where land between life and death, heaven and hell.
A novel of ideas, a narrative exploration of the question of power and
powerlessness. In her poem ‘True Stories’, Atwood writes: The true story
is vicious and multiple and untrue after all. This is true of Atwood’s
fictional universe too, at least two stories and both of them can’t be true
at once.

The novel is packed with doubles; Offred refers to them repeatedly:

Ofglen, her companion on shopping trips (“doubled, I walk the street”);

Nick, the chauffeur with whom she is having a dangerous affair (“we’re
mirrors”). Her old friend Moira, a vigorous lesbian accustomed to
bucking the system and willing to risk her life to escape the daily grind
of Gilead, is her double; Serena Joy, the commander’s wife, in whose lap
she must lie during the extremely kinky sex required by the Gilead
regime is her double. “Myself, my obverse”, Offred calls her.
• The world Offred came from, where women had jobs, and money, and
a degree of autonomy, is a double of the place she is now, where
women are entirely defined by their bodies; this is a double of the
Jekyll and Hyde variety.
• Towards the end, she observes “not one seems preferable” and waiting
for the duplicate of the experience she has already had (being abducted
and taken to a place she knows nothing about).
• The final double she encounters is the nameless handmaid who
occupied the room before her and scratched an encouraging message
inside the wardrobe – Don’t let the bastards grind you down.
• Then there are doubles like: past and present; freedom and tyranny;
time and space; male and female.
• The really frightening stuff happens during the day: visit to the doctor,
public hangings, the episode of women where they rip a man to pieces
with their bare hands. Night is reserved for safer pastimes: sex and
scrabble.
• She mocks academia in the ‘present’ : they make light of rape,
imprisonment and possible murder of a woman; they treat Offred’s
story as a blip on the big screen of history; Offred’s story is rich in
detail: what we ate, how we shopped, what shortages we endured,
what games we played, what the furniture was like, the gardens.
• This was Offred’s method by which she “hoards” her sanity. It’s the
tone of a survivor, that does not explain ‘our’ participation in the
injustices we accept and perpetuate.
• The novel is about history: not just American history, but all of it the
whole disaster we call the world – as it is about the future. Prof
Piexioto says, “ The past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes”.
It draws attention to the gap between women’s history and official
male history: female testimony and male commentary.
• We the readers are forced to join the academics looking back into that
darkness, pretending we don’t know what those echoes are saying.
• But Offred’s voice speaks clearly: History will catch up
with us, it isn’t dead any more than we are, it lies in and
upon us, parasitically, like the bacteria in our intestines,
without which we would die. If you want to see the
future, keep looking steadily behind you, because the
future, no matter how much we may pretend we don’t
know it, it’s history. (Valerie Martin)
 Characters
• One of the major areas of debate among scholars of
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is the question
of Offred’s heroism.
• Is she a valiant rebel challenging the regime’s domination
and oppression?
• Or is she a powerless victim of Gilead’s oppression?

• Or is she instead a willing or unwitting participant in the

regime?
• Those who see Offred as a rebel, cite her irony, her language play, her insistence on
retaining personal memories, and even the fact that she "wrote" the Tale in the first
place as subversive.  
• Storytelling is Offred’s means of survival and resistance, reinforcing her identity
and challenging those who would silence her . The problem with this view is that
she did not in fact "write" anything; the text we have is a much later reconstruction
— by male scholars with not very feminist opinions — of audiotaped fragments.
• Offred commits nothing to paper because she cannot and she would be in serious
trouble if she tried,. voice offers a moving testament to the power of language to
transform reality in order to overcome oppressive designs imposed on human
beings. While it may be true that Offred transforms her own reality, Gilead remains
as fictionally real as ever, and as the Historical Notes tell us it gets even worse after
Offred’s account 
• Offred’s power is in language but we need to ask how much power that truly is. If
this is resistance, as J. Brooks Bouson notes, it is a very silent and ineffectual kind.
• The fact that Offred takes no overt action against the
regime leads other critics to see her less as a heroine than
as a victim. Offred as "the victim of circumstances, not an
active agent capable of directing the plot of her own life"
Offred’s primary goal was physical survival. 

• Erika Gottlieb says, "Since the dystopian regime denies

its subjects’ free will, the central character cannot be
made responsible for his or her ultimate failure or defeat
in the repressive system that overpowers individuals”  
• Offred is complicit in the creation and perpetuation of the
Gileadean regime: "the Handmaid ultimately confesses her own
contribution to the dystopian situation in Gilead”.
• A number of critics see Offred as a participant in the regime.
Offred’s oft-quoted distinction between ignorance and ignoring
is the main evidence against her: "We lived, as usual, by
ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work
at it”. All who "ignore" are equally guilty of the results of that
complacency, a point Hannah Arendt makes in her study of
totalitarianism in saying that the masses desire or are at least
complicit in the establishment of such regimes on
totalitarianism.
•Atwood’s own view of Offred is clear: she has described Offred as "an ordinary, more-or-less
cowardly woman (rather than a heroine)”
•Atwood’s point is that "the individual is truly a part of the whole and shares responsibility for
every aspect of the system, including the perpetration of atrocity. . . . No one is exempt from
guilt, no one is blameless, Atwood implies, when it comes to the creation of a Gilead"
(Margaret 114-19).

•https://central.edu/writing-anthology/2019/06/03/the-art-of-becoming-ordinary-an-analysis-of
-the-handmaids-tale
/ 
•https://www.researchgate.net/publication/
341832027_The_power_struggle_between_Offred_and_Serena_Joy_in_Margaret_Atwood 
 
• Commander Red

• Lived in “old” America, before the Republic of Gilead overthrew the government and instituted a
new order based on a fundamentalist reading of the Old Testament.A military man. Before Gilead,
he worked as a market researcher. Now, he’s a high-ranking officer in Gilead’s new hierarchy.
•  books and other intellectual pursuits. Unfortunately, many of the books he loves are banned under
Gilead’s new laws. He uses his privileged position to hide forbidden books in his home office, even
sharing books with his Handmaid Offred – which is strictly against the law, because women aren’t
allowed to read; hiding his books and his unhappiness. Although the Commander may have helped
bring about the new Republic, he feels trapped by the lack of intellectual stimulation in this new
orthodox society.
• He is a self-centered and complex. The Commander seems like an easy-going person, a regular guy
who is willing to bend the rules for his household now and then. But the rule-breaking always
serves him ultimately, and he doesn’t care whether he risks someone else in the process. It’s hard to
say whether he truly believes in the new world he helped create
• According to the evidence analyzed by Professor Pieixoto, the Commander may have been
Frederick R. Waterford, an early leader of Gilead who was a victim of one of the early purges,
being accused of liberal tendencies and executed.
• He controls the knowledge and constructs knowledge.

(re-identification)

“ the problem wasn’t only women, he says. The main problem was with the
men. There was nothing for them anymore… the sex was too easy, anyone
could just buy it. There was nothing to work for, nothing to fight for. We
have stats from that time. You know what they were complaining about the
most? Inability to feel.”

He calls society before Gilead ‘competitive’; now women to fulfill their

biological destination without any fear. The result was: “All human qualities
are instrumentalized, and reduced to quantitative values of exchange. In
other words, the new rulers equate the value of something and someone
solely with validity, usefulness, functionality, economic profit”. (similarities
between Gilead and capitalism)
 SYMBOLS
• Journey (Motif and Symbol): Offred cannot move through Gilead; her
walks and travels are confined to shopping or Jezebel.
• Her trips/journeys are psychological; moving backward in time in an
attempt to decipher and decode how this new society came into being.
• The journeys are undertaken at night, ‘where should I go?’. These
flashbacks have two purposes: Atwood introduces: her mother, Moira,
Luke, her daughter ; introduces pre-Giledean society frighteningly
similar to our society: toxic waste, violence.
• And offer male/ female power relations then and now.
• As she is suspended in time, she understands ‘inaction’,
laments the loss of past and resists the oppression of
Gilead’s regime.
• One critic calls it, “ form of mental border patrol”,
mutating into inner space fiction; American frontier
moves in-ward, metamorphoses into the internal border.
• Male and Female Worlds:

• Personal interaction between sexes is prohibited; men exert social

control, monopolize power, and occupy the public sphere, women are
essentially powerless and relegated to the domestic sphere. Some
women however, foster the illusion of power; a power restricted to the
subjugation of female sex or female self: the aunts indoctrinate the
handmaid’s who, ‘ control’ reproduction, while the wives dominate the
domestic sphere. “Woman” participates in the dystopian system and
upholds its norms that objectify and exclude her.
• Authoritarian Oligarchy: Commanders, Eyes(secret police), The
Angels (military), and the Guardians( police).
• Color coded uniforms divide women into 8 groups based on their
reproductive functions: Sterile Wives (blue), Post menopausal,
unmarried Aunts (brown); fertile handmaids (red), elderly, sterile
servants Marthas ( green), lower class Econowives wearing red, blue,
and green stripped dresses indicative of different functions, widows
(black); and handmaids who fail to conceive declared “Unwomen”
(grey)
• Gilead’s paradigm defines womanhood and femininity as
reproduction.
• The political and social division into male(self) and (female) other
expands into the enforced psychological fragmentation of women.
• Gilead sense of self constructs everyone as other; woman is difference,
an aberration. Women involuntarily or voluntarily participate in their
own subjugation; internalize binary hierarchies.
• Handmaids exemplify the paradoxical self image of fragmented
female self: good/bad woman, the saintly prostitute; both private
property and public commodity, rendered invisible by her uniform and
visible on public display; at last a vessel, a purely objectified body
without mind.
• Mirrors: one of the many freedoms taken away; in literature it is
symbol of perception and vanity as well as symbol of anxiety and self
doubt.
• She does see her reflection on and off as we walks to shopping center
or from the corner of her eye catches her image in a mirror; but every
time these mirrors or mirror like surface reveal disturbing distorted
images duplicating the distorted society.
• She gets access to mirror: symbolic of getting access to herself; Nick
and Offred kissing illegally, “for the moment we’re mirrors”; at
Jezebel she looks at herself and recognizes the devastating truth that
she could be slaughtered anytime; a clear image of oneself can be both
enlightening and devastating.
 The Handmaid’s Tale as Post
modern fiction
• Post modernism is an approach moving beyond the modernist questioning
of previous certainties and acknowledges uncertainity in form and
language

Qualifiers:
• Everything is a construct(language/ideas we put together to better
understand a subject)
• There are different versions of the same event

• Everything is open to interpretation

• There is no certain ending

• Postmodernism is a phase in the history of mankind, society, culture,
and the individual’s thinking, in which classical traditions, the idea
of absolute truths, stable universal moral values as well as the
traditional humanist understanding of a human being are rejected.

• Postmodernism has many interpretations and that no single

definition is adequate. In literature, as Wynne-Davies (1989, 25)
states, “writers adopt a self-conscious inter-textuality sometimes
verging on pastiche, which denies the formal propriety of authorship
and genre”.
• Postmodern philosophy rejects the metanarratives of
modernity in the belief that there is no singular
conceptual system or discourse through which we can
understand and explain the totality of the world. Instead,
local narratives, perspectivism and relativism of all
knowledge and values are advocated”
Postmodern philosophy the world and reality:
•are understood as chaotic, relative, undefined, unstable, or as
interpretations, which are created by language, social,
ideological, and cultural discourses.
•“History and society are explained as fragmented and split.
• Universal truths and traditional moral values are substituted by
relative ones which are regarded as human constructs.
•The individual’s cognition is understood as always contextual.
•Postmodern philosophy is marked by the deconstruction of logo-
centric thinking based on binary oppositions: subject/object,
rational/irrational, culture/nature etc., characteristics of
modernity”.
• MODERNISM POSTMODERNISM

• form anti-form

• purpose play

• design chance

• hierarchy anarchy

• mastery logos

• exhaustion silence

• art object process

• presence absence

• centering dispersal
• genre text
• signified signifier
• readerly writerly
• genital/phallic polymorphous/androgynous
• determinacy indeterminacy
• Post-modernist literature often attempts to pick apart
everything modernism stood for, and broad horizons of
understanding in a new way. 
• Postmodern writing often explores possibilities,

• In the face of revolution, Offred denies it for a safer place

within the regime, hoping to repent anything she’d done wrong
in order to continue the new status quo. It seems like an
unlikely resolution for what is supposed to be the heroine of
the tale. She’s lost so much, why doesn’t she fight to regain her
sense of self, her family, her freedom?
• In the context of postmodernism, there is an answer to
this: “The direction of resistance in the postmodern
consequently changes from a one-directional struggle
against the dominant order to a more flexible resistance
that is context-specific (and, therefore, contradictory:
what is resistant in one context could be seen as complicit
in another).” -Marta Caminero-Santangelo, 
Moving Beyond “The Blank White Spaces”: Atwood’s Gi
lead, Postmodernism, and Strategic Resistance
• In this way, Offred’s resistance is in not active but a passive form of
saving herself in a regime out to kill and shut down women for wanting
more for themselves. In the wake of realizing a fellow Handmaid hung
herself so she wouldn’t be tortured for information, Offred offers for
God to “obliterate her” so that she can bear putting her head down and
saving herself the same fate. Shortly after, she is rescued by the same
secret resistance her ally told her of. In the epilogue, it is uncovered that
she left her memoirs in the form of tapes which were uncovered and
pieced together into the manuscript that was the novel itself. Leaving
this tale for future generations was her own form of resistance in this
way, able to do what she could to spread the truth of the time of Gilead,
of a world out to harm and control women more than ever. That same
message is one that is now so popular today, so that this fictional
warning has become more relevant than ever before.
• Postmodern fiction typically is characterized by some (if not
all) of the following attributes:

• Questioning Definitions  Postmodern fiction tends to

question our ideas of what fiction "is." A postmodernist will
question our definition of literature and what literature
should be like. A postmodernist will use nontraditional
techniques that break long held rules about how to write a
novel, story, or poem. University of Virginia's Electronic
Labyrinth has explained it thus: "the radical disruption of
linear flow of narrative; the frustration of conventional
expectations concerning unity and coherence of plot and
character and the cause and effect development thereof."
• Questioning Truths  Postmodernists try to poke holes in ideas we
feel are so obviously true that we cease to question them. Here :
"Postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which claim to
be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead
focuses on the relative truths of each person. In the postmodern
understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into
being through our interpretations of what the world means to us
individually. Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over
abstract principles, knowing always that the outcome of one's own
experience will necessarily be fallible and relative, rather than
certain and universal."
• Self-Consciousness   Postmodern fiction is often "self-
reflexive." In other words, instead of letting the reader slip
into the fictional world of the text, it makes it obvious that
this is a novel, just a novel, and does not allow us to feel
that it is real. A postmodern text points out that it is just a
product, just an object, not a reality.
• Fractured Narrative  Postmodern authors often break the
rules by using fractured, jumbled narratives and/or multiple
perspectives. There may be more than one narrator or more
than one point-of-view. The narrative might seem more like
a chaotic collage than a clear photograph.
• End of Originality Postmodernists often believe in this
world of mass media and mass production, nothing is
original. Everything is copied from somewhere else, and
our culture has lost its ability to do anything new.
• "Subjective" narrative style  Narrators often use a style
called "stream-of-consciousness," where the narrative
follows the course of a person's thoughts, not a structured
timeline of events. As Mary Klages describes it, there is
"an emphasis on HOW seeing (or reading or perception
itself) takes place, rather than on WHAT is perceived."
• During the feminist revolution of the 1970s, Atwood
echoes the sentiments of women’s rights in all of her
books, asking tough questions about where we are going
and where we have been. Atwood never shies away from
hard-hitting political statements like unfettered, unguided
nationalism, the penchant for violence in the Americas
and anti-abortion demonstrators in her work.” (20)
• The Republic of Gilead (a name borrowed from the Old Testament –
the place where Jacob and Laban “made a deal” concerning Laban’s
daughters, Leah and Rachel (Wilson 66; Steals 113)) is a modern-day
theocracy built on 17th-century Puritanical foundations underpinning
the evolution of the American mindset since the foundation of the
first New England colonies in the early 1600s.