THE HANDMAID’S TALE
Molly Andersen, Alexandra Gillespie, Isabel DiazBarriga and Dan Petrovitch
General Information
• Author: Margaret Atwood
• Date of Publication: 1998
• Genres: Dystopian fiction
ANALYSIS OF NOVEL’S PLOT &
THEMES
Setting & Time Period
• Republic of Gilead
• Totalitarian, patriarchal regime
• Women have no rights
• Women divided into classes w/
unique roles/responsibilities: Wives,
Marthas (housekeepers), Handmaids
(childbearing)
• Future
Characterization
• Protagonist: Offred
• Handmaid
• Intelligent
• Passive
• Antagonist: The government/society
• Takes away the rights of women depending on their
position
• Relationships
• Offred + Luke
• Offred + Commander
Characterization
(cont.)
• Offred + Moira
• Offred + Nick
• Commander + Serena Joy
• Key Traits
• Offred
• Confused, obedient, frustrated, wanting love
• Moira
• Disobedient, brave, angry, resistant
• Commander
• Sympathetic, but also selfish, longs for companionship
• Note: Most of the character’s actions are over determined by the
oppressive regime…Offred’s perceptions of their personalities may
not be accurate
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Major Conflicts
• Women vs. Society
• Oppression
• Loss of love/real relationships
• Separated from husband/family, forced to have
sexual relations with Commander
• Loss of freedoms
• Reading, writing, speech
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Themes
• Loss of identity
•
Women are assigned new identities: Handmaid, Wife, Martha,
Econowife
•
“My name isn’t Offred, I have another name, which nobody uses now
because it’s forbidden. I tell myself it doesn’t matter, your name is like
a telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is
wrong, it does matter” (page 84).
•
Protagonist has lived in both worlds
•
A free, educated, independent woman, forced to abandon all this
to an oppressive government
•
Aware of what she has lost
• There is a void/emptiness
• Recognizes what is happening, yet allows it to happen
•
“We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as
ignorance, you have to work at it” (page 56).
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Themes (cont.)
• Oppression of Women
• The Handmaids are just being used for their bodies,
reproduction
• Handmaids are ovaries, not individuals
• “We are containers, it’s only the insides of our
bodies that are important. The outside can become
hard and wrinkled, for all they care, like the shell of
a nut” (page 96).
• “I am thirty-three years old. I have brown hair. I
stand five seven without shoes. I have trouble
remembering what I used to look like. I have viable
ovaries. I have one more chance” (page 143).
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Themes (cont.)
• Handmaids are forced to wear long robes/headdress wigs for
modesty
• “My nakedness is strange to me already...Did I really wear
bathing suits, at the beach? I did, without thought, among
men...Shameful, immodest...I avoid looking down at my body,
not so much because it’s shameful or immodest but because I
don’t want to see it. I don’t want to look at something that
determines me so completely” (page 63).
• Offred has lost the feeling of being loved and meaningful
• “I want Luke here so badly. I want to be held and told my
name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be
more than valuable. I repeat my former name, remind myself
of what I once could do, how others saw” (page 97).
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Key Scenes
• Scrabble with the Commander, Chapters 23 and 24 (turning point)
• Breaking the rules
• “But something has changed, now, tonight” (page 143).
• “I intend to get out of here” (page 134).
• Commander now seen as human
• End of the novel
• Unsure if she was arrested or rescued
• Historical notes
• Transcript of a university conference held in 2195
• Gilead is gone, they discuss Offred’s story, which has been
published
ANALYSIS OF AUTHOR’S STYLE
AND STRUCTURE
Characteristics of the
Narrator
• First-person POV, Protagonist
• Creates an automatic bias against the society
• Indirect characterization
• Ex. Moira likes to have fun, won’t take no for an answer (page
37):
“Moira, sitting on the edge of my bed, legs crossed, ankle on knee, in her purple overalls,
one dangly earring, the gold fingernail she wore to be eccentric, a cigarette between her
stubby yellow-ended fingers. Let’s go for a beer.
You’re getting ashes in my bed, I said.
If you’d make it you wouldn’t have this problem, said Moira.
In half an hour, I said. I had a paper due the next day. What was it? Psychology, English
economics. We studied things like that, then. On the floor of the room there were books,
open face down, this way and that, extravagantly.
Now, said Moira. You don’t need to paint your face, it’s only me. What’s your paper on? I just
did one on date rape.
Date rape, I said. You’re so trendy. It sounds like some kind of dessert. Date rape.
Hah-ha, said Moira. Get your coat.
She got it herself and tossed it at me. I’m borrowing five bucks off you, okay?”
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Characteristics of the
Narrator (Cont.)
• Narrator draws conclusions
• Ex. page 56:
“Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before
you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods,
bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with, as they used to say, but they were about other
women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew.
The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we
would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too
melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives.
We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges
of the print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
• Ex. page 87:
“To be a man, watched by women. It must be entirely strange. To have them watching him all
the time. To have them wondering, What’s he going to do next? To have them flinch when he
moves, even if it’s a harmless enough move, to reach for an ashtray perhaps. To have them
sizing him up. To have them thinking, He can’t do it, he won’t do, he’ll have to do, this last as
if he were a garment, out of style or shoddy, which must nevertheless be put on because
there’s nothing else available.
To have them putting him on, trying him on, trying him out, while he himself puts them on,
like a sock over a foot, onto the stub of himself, his extra, sensitive thumb, his tentacle, his
delicate, stalked slug’s eye, which extrudes, expands, winces, and shrivels back into
himself...Still, it must be hell, to be a man, like that.”
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Characteristics of the
Narrator (Cont.)
• Narrator admits to unreliability and storytelling
• Ex. Pg. 134: “It’s impossible to say a thing exactly
the way it was, because what you say can never be
exact, you always have to leave something out.”
• Ex. Pg. 260: Tells story about encounter with
Nick…“I made that up. It didn’t happen that way.
Here is what happened.” Tells second story about
encounter with Nick…“It didn’t happen that way
either. I’m not sure how it happened; not exactly.
All I can hope for is a reconstruction…”
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Syntax
• Simple syntax
• Longer sentences are often just a series
• Nouns, adjectives, independent clauses, dependent
clauses, prepositional phrases, etc. strung together
• Ex. Pg. 64: “Behind my closed eyes I can see myself as I am
now, sitting beside an open drawer, or a trunk, in the cellar,
where the baby clothes are folded away, a lock of hair, cut
when she was two, in an envelope, white-blond.”
• Ex. Pg. 173: “Pieces of paper, thickish, greasy to the touch,
green-colored, with pictures on each side, some old man in a
wig and on the other side a pyramid with an eye above it.”
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Syntax (Continued)
• Ex. Pg. 84: “Luke drove, I sat beside him, the sun shone, the sky
was blue, the houses as we passed them looked comforting and
ordinary, each house as it was left behind vanishing into past time,
crumbling in an instant as if it had never been, because I would
never see it again, or so I thought then.”
• Florid prose
• Descriptive depth
• Often uses a full paragraph or two to describe a single object,
event, idea
• See above examples
• Lists + Florid prose = Drawn out narrative
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Diction
• Complex
• Examples: bereaved, ethereal, perfidy, indecorous,
lanolined, platitude
• Irony of Offred’s Diction
• Her vocabulary is impressive
• Uses her vocabulary well to create eloquent + insightful
description/analysis
• But she is lower class, not even allowed to read,
considered a non-thinker
Mood
• Oppressed: especially created by the amount of time
we spend in Offred’s head
• Sovereignty of the mind/consciousness
• Fearful
• Dark
• Nostalgic: Offred’s life straddles two realities, unlike
many characters in dystopian fiction (i.e. Winston
Smith)
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Structure of the
Narrative
• Chronological, with frequent flashbacks
• To college, to the Red Center, to her time w/ Luke,
etc.
• Distinction between present and flashback is very
fluid/seamless
• Ex. Page 88: Commander is reading from
Bible…“And so on and so forth. We had it read to
us every breakfast, as we sat…” page and a half of
flashback to Red Center, page break, Commander
resumes reading
IMPACT OF STRUCTURE ON
READER’S EXPERIENCE
• Puts the reader “inside her head”, makes us feel like we
are listening to her thoughts
• Distorts reader’s sense of time
• “There’s time to spare. This is one of the things I
wasn’t prepared for-the amount of unfilled time, the
long parentheses of nothing. Time as white sound.”
(pg. 69)
• White noise: noise containing many frequencies with
equal intensities
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Theme Statement
When an educated, independent woman comes in
conflict with a totalitarian, extreme, and theocratic
government, in a situation in which she is forced into
submission, stripped of her past identity and valued only for
her body, the results may be that she is constantly
tormented by her past life, rebels internally and succumbs
outwardly, yet always sustains the hope that things will get
better. Furthermore, the sovereignty of men over women
deems itself unsuccessful for a society, as evidenced by the
ultimate failure of the government that supported unequal
rights.
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The End
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