Multiple reflections: Jackie Shead explores layers of meaning in Margaret Atwood's The
Handmaid's Tale
In the first paragraph of The Handmaid's Tale we are introduced to two images
connected to the passage of time. The first is the palimpsest--the idea of a place as
a text bearing the superimposed imprints of successive eras. The second is the
mirrorball--a symbol of passing time which probably owes more to the movie industry
than to literature. While the revolving globe suggests, perhaps, the natural and
inevitable passage of time, a layered text best suggests the deliberate imprints of
human history and cultural phases.
These images apply to more than the novel's ideas about time. Through Professor
Pieixoto's account of how Offred's tale was put together, Atwood encourages us to
see them as symbols of the text itself too. In the manner of a palimpsest, Offred's
story was recorded over previous recordings, themselves spanning several decades
of music. And, in the absence of numbers on the tapes, the professor had to
sequence them himself, assembling a whole out of discrete sections, as a globe is
assembled from a mass of flat surfaces.
Readers as interpreters
The professor's difficulties of reconstruction draw attention to the crucial role readers
play in interpreting a text, especially one as layered and fragmented as The
Handmaid's Tale. We have to piece together Offred's story, fill in silences and gaps,
and 'magic eye' the text to reveal obscured layers of meaning, just as Offred,
watching the news, hopes to 'read beneath it' for some truth (p. 92). Not only is
interpretation a complex matter, it requires a special kind of involvement from the
readers. The idea of the novel as a mirror suggests it might be possible to see
oneself in it, perhaps identify with a character. However, unlike a flat looking glass
which simply offers self-regard (admiring or critical), a mirrorball offers us many
reflections besides our own. It is a perfect visual representation of the feeling that-with just a few steps to the right or left--we could be in someone else's shoes.
Conflicting significances
Like Gilead, the text is crisscrossed by conflicting significances, and language itself
is shown to have layers of meaning. Even single words are like palimpsests. For
example, when Ofglen says: 'It's a beautiful May day' (p. 53), we discover later she
was hinting her allegiance to the resistance movement. But the significance 'Mayday'
holds for Ofglen is lost on Offred, who connects what she hears to her past, private
life. Her thoughts turn to a conversation with Luke about the word's French origin,
and from there to her present situation and desperate need for help. At this point she
is not alive to the political significance of the word, its most recent layer.
At a micro-level, single words and phrases are also like mirrorballs. The only reason
Offred can be so lighthearted about the term 'date rape' is her sheer failure to identify
with the victims or imagine herself in any such situation. But the monthly
assignations with the Commander--prearranged appointments for enforced sex--give
a horrific new twist to the term. Offred tells us she used to read stories in the
newspapers and think 'they were about other women and the men who did such
things were other men ... We were the people who were not in the papers' (p. 66)
until a totalitarian regime leaves her no space to 'hide in the margins'. So, an ability
to recognise ourselves in a text--to see that it could apply to us--is crucial to the way
we read it. This is shown in a tiny piece of text to which Offred has secret access:
Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.
A mini-text
This brief text is the message scratched in the cupboard in Offred's room. Offred's
difficulties in interpretation are immediate and basic--she knows no Latin. Bur while
the actual meaning is lost on her, the message's presence is significant in itself. As a
forbidden act of writing it must be subversive. Hence Offred feels pleased 'that her
taboo message made it through, to at least one other person ... was opened and
read by me' (p. 62). It has an encouraging effect similar to Moira's influence.
Offred has to wait some time before she can 'magic eye' levels of significance below
the scratching--until the Commander shows her another text, his old Latin grammar
primer, which has the same words in the margin. The Commander's textbook
scribblings were themselves borrowings from older boys, but were, nonetheless,
signs of a subversive attitude to the authority figures of his youth. In her turn, Offred's
predecessor has borrowed the joke-Latin to communicate with her imagined
successor, and imbued it with a private intensity far removed from the original
schoolboy burnout.
Here Atwood shows how we draw personal significance from what we read and
invest it with our own meanings. She shows too that the significance of words
changes with fuller understanding--as Offred says, 'context is all' (p. 202). Once
shown the primer, Offred is quick to put two and two together: 'it's all before me now.
I can see why she wrote that, on the wall of the cupboard, but I also see that she
must have learned it, here, in this room' (p. 197). Her next questions to the
Commander quickly unearth the rest of the story--Serena Joy's discovery of the
relationship and the previous handmaid's suicide. Given her own secret meetings
with the Commander, Offred now sees herself reflected in the Latin text in new and
more horrific ways. It revolves, offering alternative significances. Is it perhaps an
encoded warning, chosen precisely because it comes from the Commander's study,
as a desperate attempt to alert Offred to the danger she is in? Whatever the previous
Offred meant, events take what we write and give them a different significance.
When Offred dwells on her predecessor's suicide, the words assume an unintended
irony: 'Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Fat lot of good it did her. Why fight?' (p.
237). What first seemed a defiant call for survival begins to look like a pointless, lastgasp gesture.
The last reference to the Latin phrase comes on Offred's final night in the house. She
reviews her options: arson, suicide, attacking Serena, pleading for protection from
Fred himself: 'I could go to the Commander, fall on the floor ... weep, implore. Nolite
te bastardes carborundorum, I could say. Not a prayer' (p. 304). As so often, we
have to fill the gaps, make the connections. What is the unspoken thought between 'I
could say' and 'Not a prayer'? Possibly Offred's recognition that the Commander is
incapable of making connections and could never imagine himself in her situation.
He reads on one level only, which brings us to the fictional reader of Offred's tale-Professor Pieixoto.
The final lecture: another layer
At the end of the novel, Atwood introduces a fictional response to Offred's story in
the shape of Professor Pieixoto. Atwood places great importance on the lecture the
Professor gives and has offered the surprising information that she wrote it before
she wrote the body of the novel. Others have detailed the useful role of the lecture in
giving material unavailable from Offred--about the workings of Gilead and the
regime's demise. But when we consider Professor Pieixoto as a reader and
interpreter, his lecture is disturbing.
Every story implies a reader (or listener); and, while Offred's situation makes her
doubt if her tale will ever be heard, her need is so desperate that she creates an
imaginary audience: 'if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to a someone.
You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else' (p. 49). As her
story progresses, the way she addresses her imagined readers shifts from making
distinctions between her situation and theirs--'if you happen to be a man, sometime
in the future, and you've made it this far, please remember: you will never be
subjected to the temptation of feeling you must forgive, a man, as a woman' (p. 144)-to supposing a mutuality, and recognising that all readers have their own story. The
decent thing is to listen, just as we hope to be listened to:
I keep on going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this
limping and mutilated story, because after all I want you
to hear
it as I will hear yours too if I ever get the chance, if I
meet you
or if you escape. (p. 279)
The lack of mutuality
Shockingly, Atwood has created for Offred's tale a reader who displays no mutuality
at all. In the lecture's opening Atwood encodes her message to her own readers
(Denay, Nunavit--deny none of it), which is precisely what Pieixoto sets about doing
through his chauvinism and an indifference masquerading as objectivity. His sexism
is displayed in his opening remarks to the Chair, who, though a professor herself, is
alluded to not as an academic equal but publicly sexualised. Of course, Atwood has
chosen the politically correct term 'chair' to show that decades of struggle for
linguistic equality can't curb Professor Pieixoto and his likes. That there are plenty
more like him is clear from references to Professor Wade's sexist sense of humour: 'I
am sure all puns were intentional, particularly that having to do with the vulgar
signification of the word tail' (p. 313). Here one is reminded of Offred's earlier
wordplay on date rape, amusing only if you ignore the victims. Ignoring victims is,
however, Professor Pieixoto's forte. He is not interested in Offred's experiences as
such. Note the time he devotes to speculations on her identity compared to that of
her commander. Evidently Offred's story is a disappointment and he would give all
her tapes for a few printouts from Fred's computer.
In case we feel inclined to grant Professor Pieixoto a historian's proper and natural
scepticism, Atwood undermines him by exposing his prejudices--women can't be
trusted and men can. Pieixoto suggests Offred is an unreliable source, motivated by
malice. In contrast, he repeatedly cites the sociologist Limpkin as an authority,
though Limpkin's diary is obviously riddled with snide remarks and personal insults.
Perhaps most telling is what the professor sees in the mirrorball. He identifies with
Nick, the fertile male in the story. Though Pieixoto grudgingly admits the human
heart 'remains a factor' he assumes Nick's motives were self-interested ones
connected to the unborn child. Offred inspires no sympathy in the professor, nor can
he imagine another male inspired by her, except as she contributes to that man's
power and status.
So, like Gilead's attempts to intervene and overlay the past, the Professor's lecture is
a barrier placed between the readers and their response to Offred's tale. He
superimposes an interpretation that encourages us to dismiss, doubt, even to mock
Offred. I see this as a kind of test by Atwood, of our good faith. In an interview in
THE ENGLISH REVIEW, Vol. 2, No. 2, she said the following about her imagined
readers: 'I expect them to be up to my tricks, cognisant of what I'm doing. But I also
would like them to be a reader who is reading first of all for the experience of the
book.' If we read Offred's tale for the experience, we can hold on to the authenticity
of what it shows us. If we do so, despite Professor Pieixoto, Offred is not off-read.
Jackie Shead is Lecturer in English at Filton College, Bristol.
Shead, Jackie