Women in The Handmaid’s Tale
Role of Women – Atwood’s abiding social and political concerns are evident – her scrutiny of structures of
oppression within public and private life. Her feminist concerns extend or blur into basic human rights.
Women’s bodies are political instruments. Due to the decreased birth rates the single goal: control of reproduction. Women’s bodies
are controlled through their political subjugation. They are treated as subhuman – reduced to their fertility.
Handmaids ‘as seeds’, ‘two-legged wombs’, ‘sacred vessels’, ‘ambulatory chalices’ – in interests of patriarchal elite. Women are
denied freedom of sexual choice or lifestyle. The Rulers have the power and use & abuse language. Lesser humans have no
freedom and no name (identity – Offred – a patronym).
Unwomen – banished to colonies cleaning up radioactive waste. Jezebels – sex servants, drugs & alcohol.
All women are casualties of the system.
Offred tells stories of many other women as well as her own. Some fixed in past, some end while she is
telling her own.
Offred appears as a woman who has (like many) taken her freedom in the 1980s for granted and let
others do the fighting (she did not look beyond her situation – survival before ‘sisterhood’). Once these
freedoms are removed she is resigned to her role. She silently rebels against the system at first (humour
bitter/ironic, small acts of rebellion like stealing objects/looks, separation of body and mind), then
progresses to transgress in her arrangements with the Commander and Nick to a point where she speaks
out but telling her story and the stories of the other women. Her narrative or her story is her final protest
and ultimate change of her character. Her narrative is an act of defiance and by telling her story she
refuses to forget the past or reconcile with the present.
Female heroism/activists/feminists (both these characters have criticised Offred for her indifference
towards Women’s Rights 1980s.)
Her mother – recaptured memory & in film Chpts 7 & 39
Moira – Offred delights in her courage Chpts 13, 15, and 22 and sees the corrosion of her character at
Jezebels Chpt 37 & 38. Moira’s story is unfinished. Offred’s hero, she represents the ideal but also a source
of guilt (that she is not like her).
“Moria had a bad reputation”
‘She is a cunning and dangerous woman”
“Moria had power now, she’d been set loose, she’d set herself loose. She was now a loose woman”
“Moria was our fantasy lava beneath the crust of daily life”,“the Aunts were less fearsome & more absurd.
Their power had a flaw in it.”
To dishevelled Playboy Bunny -“scent of working flesh”, ‘crummy power trip”, “three to four good years
before your snatch wears out”, “indifference, a lack of volition” - she demonstrated that one person
cannot succeed in such a crushing regime – she becomes a fragment of history in Gilead. Gilead
offered her a ‘tolerable’ though sordid option – effectively the regime silenced her. (Sad, anti-climax)
Other Handmaids double her – sad subtexts of rebels and victims (Janine – indoctrinated at the Red
Centre, driven insane at the end of the text). Her nameless predecessor Chpt 9, 29, 46. Ofglen (May Day
Resistance)in Chpt 5 who is more like Moria (her suicide after Salvaging Chpt44). Their stories tell of
Offred’s survival within Gilead’s regime.
Serena Joy – of New Right movement in 1980s, pro women’s return to domestic roles and in fear of the
‘birth dearth’. Ironic state she finds herself in, in Gilead. She as a character is not ‘happy’ with what she
advocated for. Her garden is the only thing she can ‘control’ now (flowers in rows, digs at earth, orders
of assistance). She uses Offred’s daughter as a form of revenge.
“I want to see as little of you as possible.”
“My husband.”
“Serena has begun to cry.”
“Which of us is it worse for, her or me?”
"She doesn't make speeches anymore. She has become speechless. She stays in her home, but it doesn't
seem to agree with her. How furious she must be now that she has been taken at her word." Chapter 8
“Many of the Wives have such gardens, it’s something for them to order and maintain and care for.” Pg9
“She doesn’t speak to me, unless she can’t avoid it. I am a reproach to her; and a necessity.” Pg 10
(Handmaids =sanctioned adultery) *further description of Offred’s first meeting pg11-14. Obvious friction
between these characters.
FYI: In 1982 the Equal Rights Amendment Act failed to be ratified due to opposition of Pro-Life
campaigner and fundamentalist Christians.
The Aunts – brutal, hold positions of ‘power’ in the indoctrination process at the Red Centre, Salvagings
and Prayvaganza (public duties). They show no sign of ‘sisterhood’. They inflict punishment on to
Handmaids. "Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now,
but after a time it will. It will become ordinary."
“There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of
anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.”
Offred and her narration START
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1st person narrative, self-conscious narrator.
4 Layers of time ‘plimpsest’ – pre-Revolution past, time of Revolution, the Gileadean period, postGileadean period. *accounting for her double vision of past and present.
Offred’s story is a record of everyday life – showing scrupulous attention to realistic detail. This is
shows unexciting monotony of the life of a Handmaid. It shows her crisis in a public and personal
sense ie: Public = Birth Day, Prayvaganza, Salvaging, monthly Ceremony. Personal = secret dates
with Commander and date to Jezebels, plus liaison’s with Nick.
She shows the complex way the memory works. The present moment is never self-contained but
pervaded by traces of other times & events. Her narrative is discontinuous, frequent time shifts,
short scenes, and an unfinished ending. It is a RECONSTRUCTION (for her and for us and of her
story as a whole).
Autobiographical narrative that challenges absolute authority of Gilead (it is a political
statement).
As Offred is boxed in society, details become important.
She has a sharpness of mind, a critical view, intelligent, honest about her cowardice.
Language – many everyday items/ observations are likened to sickening or violent images eg:
‘like the place in a face where the eye has been taken out’ (light in room), ‘like the skin under a
scab half-dead, flexible and pink’(Guardian of the Faith), ‘headless sheep’(cloud), ‘look oddly
like babies coffins’(urinals). Reveals Offred’s state of mind, violence in Gilead.
She lives in a confined world, she is bored, brink madness/ despair/ suicide. ‘no glass’, ‘I wish I had
a knife like that.’ She has problems remaining mentally stable – she likens herself to tortured
animals: ‘caged rates who’d give themselves electric shocks for something to do’, ‘pigeons,
trained to peck a button… they’d peck themselves to death rather than quit’, ‘groomed prize
pig’. *Link to Tulips (also symbol in novel) poem by Sylvia Plath.
Storytelling ensures Offred’s psychological survival and allows her to ‘reconstruct’ herself.
At start of novel she is conditioned by Gilead – dehumanised and shut down ‘My self is a thing.. a
made thing, not something born’ – saying she is no one particular and ‘it’. ‘That is how I feel:
white, flat, thin. I feel transparent’ “I too am disembodied.”
Offred had been unaware of premonitory symptoms in society therefore unexpectedly surprised
by emergence of the new, fundamentalist regime. Signs she ignored (deliberately ignored). Only
when freedoms are lost she understands what ‘freedom’, ‘happiness’, and ‘normality’ are.
Offred highlights the paradoxes & dilemmas of contemporary feminism. Atwood warns about
complacency. By Offred remaining uninvolved she (and others) has forfeited human rights. Her
own non-involvement is here true for an entire society. They reflect Atwood’s basic concern that
victimisation, in a real sense, is at least partly a matter of choice.
“I used to think of my body as an instrument of pleasure or a means of
transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will… Now
the flesh arranges itself differently. I’m a cloud, congealed around a
central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am
and glows red within its translucent wrapping.”
“I have failed once again to fulfil the expectations of others, which have
become my own.”
“Sanity is a valuable possession. I hoard it the way people hoarded money.
I save it so I will have enough when the time comes.”
“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum”
Offred is a victim – showing man’s inhumanity to man - and to women.
‘And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light.’
Men in The Handmaid’s Tale
‘Big Brother’, in the novel is not simply an embodiment of
patriarchy or God, but rather of ideology in general; Gilead
has permitted itself to be poisoned with radioactivity & with
a far more pernicious entity: fanaticism that is political,
religious & moral.
Luke
20th century man.
Flashbacks of Luke are brief through initial chapters.
Flashbacks extend as Offred’s mind is again re-engaged.
Luke used to tease Offred’s mum about naturalised sex-gender differentiations (ironic as Gilead came to
be).
Commander Fred
Offred is ambivalent in her feelings toward Fred.
Grotesque threesome – Offred sacrificial victim in a ritual of insemination.
“He was not a monster to her.” Compares Commander to Nazi general and acknowledging Fred’s
responsibility for oppression.
In the past she joked about date rape pg 36, ironically Jezebels encounter draws similarities.
She knows that through meetings she can read, talk, and a return to a ‘sense of herself as an individual.
Here in his study the old familiar social & sexual codes are played out. They both escape loneliness.
She becomes the ‘other women’ as she has been in the past with ‘Luke’.
This relationship shows how basic human desires for intimacy & love are repressed pg221 “Love? Said the
Commander.” “Falling in love, I said. Falling into it, we all did then…it was the way you understood
yourself…”
His character shows that ‘everyone’ is unhappy and aware of their imprisonment within their self-created
ideological system.
Nick
The ‘winker’. A fleeting embrace in the sitting room.
Chptr 4 description, pg 75/6 touching her with foot in ceremony,
Love affair Chpt 40-41 show conventional features of a love story.
Under the confines/ rules of Gilead it is impossible so…
Offred retells affair with a disbelief of its reality.
Fullest human relationship (in Gilead) is an ‘arrangement’, a ‘forbidden oasis’
Nick fulfils Offred’s ‘hope’
Double irony in this relationship as it achieves the goals of Gilead which Offred resisted. She gets
pregnant and wants to stay in her own private utopia pgs 281, 283.
All she has in the end with Nick is ‘trust’ pg 306.
Professor Pieixoto [Historical Notes]
In the end Offred’s story (her story) is almost drowned out by his male voice (history).
He too, criticises Offred for not paying attention to signs of the onset of Gilead formation in the events.
He has arranged the tapes into his order.
Abrupt shift from Offred to his voice and challenges the reader to question his male interpretation of
events.
In a way like Gilead he is effectively removing her authority over her own life story, renaming it in a
gesture that parallels Gilead’s patriarchal suppression of women’s identity. What Offred feared ‘From the
point of view of future history, we’ll be invisible.’ Pg 240.