Analysis
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Analysis
The Handmaid’s Tale (Critical Survey of Contemporary
Fiction)
The parting “Historical Notes” clarify this tale’s supposed genesis as a series of cassette tapes found in a
footlocker along the Femaleroad in Maine. Similar to the Underground Railroad that spirited slaves from the
South to safety in Canada over 150 years earlier, this Underground Femaleroad led women out of their
theological and social bondage in America to a free life in Europe. Now, these tapes have been transcribed
and authenticated, with the results of this effort being presented to the “Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean
Studies” in 2195.
As a thirty-three-year-old Handmaid, Offred had but one role in her society, one function to perform: produce
babies. Her life was the ultimate denial of choice or, seen otherwise, the ultimate glory. This latter
interpretation was that which enlivened her household world within the Christian theocracy that was America
in the early twenty-first century. Hers was the Gileadean society.
Seizing power in the late twentieth century, the Guardians killed off the Congress, President, and Constitution,
replacing them with a society built on strict biblical teaching and radical social adjustment. Working then
across this tableau of upheaval, THE HANDMAID’S TALE is strongest when centered on Offred’s
assignment and the household where she is expected to give birth. Here Atwood develops the personalities
that enliven the novel: the Commander, with his urge for surreptitious Scrabble; Nick, the Guardian/chauffeur
with the latter trade’s stereotypic roving eye; and Serena Joy, the gospel television starlet turned wizened hag.
Unfortunately, this novel flags because it lacks both a credible explanation for the abrupt collapse of
constitutional government and a clear sense of the good which has been replaced by the present evil. Although
Atwood makes a feeble attempt to supply this information, it is inadequate; we must take her usurpation
premise on faith. She may expect such faith and understanding from readers who have followed her through
five previous novels, but this assumption cripples a novel which will, thus, be variously labeled a feminist
nightmare or a prescient statement of Christian Right extremism. It is neither.
Bibliography
Grace, Sherrill E., and Lorraine Weir, eds. Margaret Atwood: Language, Text, and System. Vancouver:
University of British Columbia Press, 1983. Includes nine essays examining Atwood’s literary “system” and
her development of style and subject matter up to the publication of The Handmaid’s Tale.
Greene, Gayle. Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1991. The author discusses Atwood and other contemporary women writers who employ narrative
strategies that incorporate women’s perspectives and challenge traditional modes of storytelling. She sees The
Handmaid’s Tale as less feminist in vision than Atwood’s previous novels.
1
Hammar, Stephanie Barbe. “The World As It Will Be? Female Satire and the Technology of Power in The
Handmaid’s Tale.” Modern Language Studies 22, no. 2 (Spring, 1990): 39-49. The article discusses The
Handmaid’s Tale as a work with satiric intent. Atwood warns of the abuses of technology, the domination of
women by men, and the propensity to allow oneself to be trapped in a rigid role.
Kostash, Myrna, et al. Her Own Woman: Profiles of Ten Canadian Women. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada,
1975. Contains a biographical essay by Valerie Miner, “Atwood in Metamorphosis: An Authentic Canadian
Fairy Tale,” that examines the evolution and maturation of Atwood’s writing.
McCombs, Judith, ed. Critical Essays on Margaret Atwood. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. This valuable volume
contains thirty-two reviews, articles, and essays on Atwood’s prose and poetry. The essays are arranged in
chronological order. The volume contains a primary bibliography to 1986.
Mendez-Engle, Beatrice, ed. Margaret Atwood: Reflections and Reality. Edinburg, Tex.: Pan American
University Press, 1987. This selection of critical essays on Atwood’s work includes an interview with
Atwood. The essays trace Atwood’s development as a writer and include a discussion of her use of fables.
Rigney, Barbara Hill. Margaret Atwood. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1987. An analysis of Atwood
as poet, novelist, and political commentator, all from a feminist perspective. Includes a useful bibliography.
Rosenberg, Jerome H. Margaret Atwood. Boston: Twayne, 1984. A concise literary biography of the
Canadian novelist and poet that provides a useful introduction to her works.
Van Spanckeren, Kathryn, and Jan Garden Castro, eds. Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. This useful collection contains essays on Atwood’s works that are
of uniformly high quality. Several essays deal with The Handmaid’s Tale.
2
The Plot (Critical Survey of Science Fiction and Fantasy)
In the late 1980’s, an ultraconservative religious group toppled the U.S. government and established a
totalitarian regime called Gilead. The leadership is strictly Christian in nature and ruthlessly fascist in
practice. Using the former society’s plummeting birth rates as an excuse, the Gilead leaders force women into
restricted roles in society, with little freedom or power. Couples in the upper classes who are without children
are assigned Handmaids, who essentially are legal concubines intended to bear their hosts’ children. These
Handmaids are fertile women who were politically unsafe, divorced, or in second marriages.
The narrator is a Handmaid assigned to the family of a high-ranking commander. She loses her identity and
original family, and she is renamed “of Fred” (the commander’s first name), or Offred. Offred is cared for by
the family in exchange for having sex with the commander. In an elaborate ceremony required by the society,
Offred lies between the legs of Fred’s wife during the act, making her resemble a substitute womb for the
wife. This ritual enacts a literal translation of the Old Testament, in which Rachel says to Jacob, “Behold my
maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her” (Genesis
30:1-3).
Even this tightly controlled society has hidden rebellions. The commander arranges clandestine meetings with
Offred. They talk and play Scrabble. Such relationships of Handmaids and their hosts are forbidden, as
Handmaids are meant solely for procreation. Offred’s walking partner, Ofglen, reveals another rebellion, a
resistance group called Mayday, of which she is a member.
The commander’s wife arranges for Offred to have an affair with Nick, the chauffeur, so that she might
become pregnant even if the commander is sterile. Offred begins to fall in love with Nick and loses all desire
for the rebellion encouraged by her friends in Mayday.
Offred’s tenuous situation becomes more precarious when the commander’s wife learns of Offred’s secret
meetings with the commander. Ofglen is discovered to be part of Mayday and is killed. Offred’s story ends in
a dramatic climax. The black death van of Gilead arrives at the house to take Offred. At that moment, it is
unclear why the van came for her. To her surprise and dismay, Nick appears at her door with the military men
and hands her over. As she passes him, he whispers in her ear to go with them because they are from Mayday
and will take her outside Gilead. Offred goes into the van. Her ultimate fate, whether betrayal or salvation, is
not revealed.
The final chapter of the novel is an epilogue set two hundred years after the story of Offred. The keynote
speaker at a symposium on Gileadean studies is a professor who has been studying a document called “The
Handmaid’s Tale.” He makes a few comments on the possible authenticity of this document, which was
discovered shortly after the regime of Gilead fell. It remains unclear whether Offred escaped safely or,
instead, that only her story survived.
3
The Handmaid’s Tale (Critical Guide to Censorship and
Literature)
The Work
Among the most frequently banned books of the 1990’s, The Handmaid’s Tale won Canada’s most
prestigious award for fiction, the Governor General’s Literary Award. The novel is narrated by a woman
known as Offred (Of Fred), a “Handmaid” to a Commander and the Commander’s Wife in the fictional
Republic of Gilead. As Offred describes events in her highly controlled life, she recalls times before religious
fundamentalists assumed political control, a period when she was a wife, mother, and librarian.
Complaints about The Handmaid’s Tale, which has been used in literature study at the high school level,
have included objections to its allegedly despairing themes, depictions of women as sex objects, profanity,
sexually explicit scenes, and anti-Christian themes.
Bibliography
Grace, Sherrill E., and Lorraine Weir, eds. Margaret Atwood: Language, Text, and System. Vancouver:
University of British Columbia Press, 1983. Includes nine essays examining Atwood’s literary “system” and
her development of style and subject matter up to the publication of The Handmaid’s Tale.
Greene, Gayle. Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1991. The author discusses Atwood and other contemporary women writers who employ narrative
strategies that incorporate women’s perspectives and challenge traditional modes of storytelling. She sees The
Handmaid’s Tale as less feminist in vision than Atwood’s previous novels.
Hammar, Stephanie Barbe. “The World As It Will Be? Female Satire and the Technology of Power in The
Handmaid’s Tale.” Modern Language Studies 22, no. 2 (Spring, 1990): 39-49. The article discusses The
Handmaid’s Tale as a work with satiric intent. Atwood warns of the abuses of technology, the domination of
women by men, and the propensity to allow oneself to be trapped in a rigid role.
Kostash, Myrna, et al. Her Own Woman: Profiles of Ten Canadian Women. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada,
1975. Contains a biographical essay by Valerie Miner, “Atwood in Metamorphosis: An Authentic Canadian
Fairy Tale,” that examines the evolution and maturation of Atwood’s writing.
McCombs, Judith, ed. Critical Essays on Margaret Atwood. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. This valuable volume
contains thirty-two reviews, articles, and essays on Atwood’s prose and poetry. The essays are arranged in
chronological order. The volume contains a primary bibliography to 1986.
Mendez-Engle, Beatrice, ed. Margaret Atwood: Reflections and Reality. Edinburg, Tex.: Pan American
University Press, 1987. This selection of critical essays on Atwood’s work includes an interview with
Atwood. The essays trace Atwood’s development as a writer and include a discussion of her use of fables.
Rigney, Barbara Hill. Margaret Atwood. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1987. An analysis of Atwood
as poet, novelist, and political commentator, all from a feminist perspective. Includes a useful bibliography.
Rosenberg, Jerome H. Margaret Atwood. Boston: Twayne, 1984. A concise literary biography of the
Canadian novelist and poet that provides a useful introduction to her works.
4
Van Spanckeren, Kathryn, and Jan Garden Castro, eds. Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. This useful collection contains essays on Atwood’s works that are
of uniformly high quality. Several essays deal with The Handmaid’s Tale.
5
Places Discussed (Critical Guide to Settings and Places in
Literature)
Gilead
Gilead. Future name for the northeastern section of the United States. In Margaret Atwood’s vision of the
future, the government of the United States has been overthrown by a group of right-wing, conservative
Christians bent on transforming what they see as a decadent society into a theocracy. Atwood draws on the
culture of the United States in 1985 and extrapolates what might happen if trends present in that year were to
continue into the future. For example, in Gilead, birth rates have plummeted as a result of widespread
contamination of the air, water, and earth. Further, Christians, sickened by divorce, pornography, and
abortion, outlaw all three. They also take away a woman’s right to own property or have money of her own;
everything is in her husband’s name. Women who have been divorced but who are proven to be fertile, such
as the main character in the novel, are found guilty of the crime of adultery, and are given to the rulers of
Gilead in order to provide children for childless couples.
Atwood deliberately places Gilead in New England; landmarks such as the library and the wall are clearly
taken from Cambridge, where Harvard University is located. The irony in this location is twofold: In the first
place, Massachusetts was first established as a theocracy by the pilgrim fathers, who applied a strict
interpretation of the Bible to all aspects of life. Indeed, it was the Puritans of the seventeenth century who
were responsible for the Salem witch trials and subsequent burnings.
As a side note, Atwood, a Canadian writer, dedicates the novel to her ancestor, Mary Webster, a woman
convicted of witchcraft in Salem and sentenced to hang. When she was cut down from the scaffold in the
morning, she was found to be still alive and was thus set free. Webster immigrated to Canada soon after. The
second irony is that Harvard University is the premier site of learning in the United States. Gilead, by contrast,
is a country ruled by keeping people ignorant. Written language is reserved for only the most powerful men;
pictographs replace signs, and women are not permitted to read. Furthermore, Atwood’s second dedication is
to Perry Miller, her professor of American literature at Harvard University. In the closing sequence of the
book, an academic recognized by critics as being a parody of Miller addresses a large academic assembly. The
academic reveals himself to be both ignorant and patronizing in his analysis of the state of Gilead.
Colonies
Colonies. Unspecified location where infertile women, or “unwomen,” and divorced women are sent to clean
up toxic waste. The major threat made against the handmaids is that they will be sent to the colonies if they do
not comply with the demands of the commanders and Gileadian society. In addition, handmaids who have
three assignments without producing an offspring are automatically sent to the colonies. Postmenopausal and
divorced women who refuse to become handmaids are also sent to the colonies. Life is extremely cruel in this
location, and most women survive only a short time.
*Canada
*Canada. While none of the action of the book takes place in Canada, the country represents freedom to the
persecuted of Gilead. Indeed, the narrator of the book and her husband are arrested as they try to flee to
Canada with their daughter. The final section of the book suggests that the narrator once again tried to flee to
Canada and hid for a time in a barn in Maine, a hideout on the underground “frailroad,” modeled on the
Underground Railroad instituted by abolitionists in the years before the American Civil War.
6
Form and Content (Survey of Young Adult Fiction)
Offred, the narrator of The Handmaid’s Tale, is one of a class of women who are trained to serve the master
class—in this case, the Commander and his wife, Serena Joy. Offred remembers and indeed yearns for the
husband and child that belonged to her in the time that the Republic of Gilead was the United States. All the
democratic rights that were taken for granted in America have vanished in this future world—including a
woman’s right to marry, to hold a job, or to do anything without the approval of her master and mistress.
Offred speaks as a character who has partially become accustomed to this new world. She is aware that it
came about because of the social chaos of American democracy. There was too much violence; people were
too free to do as they liked. At least this is how the United States is viewed from the perspective of Offred’s
authoritarian society. Yet, Offred has not been brainwashed. Like Winston Smith in George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-four (1948), she has a mind of her own, but she has to conceal it. She is afraid of being
punished for her independent thoughts. She has a friend, Moira, who represents everything that Offred would
like to be. Moira is outspoken and rebellious. She does not accept the subjection of women for a moment or
believe that any class of people has the right to rule others.
Offred is wistful about the past. It is hard to recall, however, when her present is so filled with her duties as a
Handmaid. She is surprised when the Commander takes an interest in her—proposing they attend a costume
party and then making sexual advances to her. In the Republic of Gilead, Handmaids such as Offred are only
meant to be procreators—that is, they have sex with their masters only for the purposes of childbearing. The
Commander, however, obviously chafes under the rigid, puritanical regime, and he looks to Offred to relieve
his frustrations, even though he is breaking the very rules that he is pledged to uphold.
Offred uses the Commander’s attentions to win a few freedoms for herself, realizing that to the Commander
she is merely a plaything and that he cannot be trusted with her real inner feelings. She must also be cautious
because Serena Joy, the Commander’s wife, would surely have Offred punished if she were to discover that
Offred and her husband had a sexual relationship outside of their officially sanctioned mating sessions. Offred
finds her true lover in Nick, who is also employed by the Commander and his wife. Nick risks certain death if
his liaison with Offred is discovered, yet the couple (again like Winston Smith and his beloved in Nineteen
Eighty-four) are compelled to express their humanity by carrying on their secret affair. In each other they find
an outlet for expressing all those emotional human needs that their society represses by restricting both males
and females to prescribed roles.
Offred’s fate is not entirely clear because the novel ends with an appendix that reveals that Offred’s narrative
has been discovered by a later society—one that apparently has restored something like the equality of the
sexes and individual liberties that Offred desired. From the perspective of the appendix, then, Offred’s
narrative becomes a kind of Old Testament, a record of the human quest for self-expression and redemption.
7
The Handmaid's Tale (Literary Masterpieces, Volume 9)
Political climates have played major roles in several of Margaret Atwood’s novels, particularly in Life Before
Man (1979) and Bodily Harm (1982). In these novels, the sense of social upheaval provides not merely a
social context for her protagonists, but it also mirrors their emotional conflict. What does society, so restless
and discontent, need to become harmonious? Are revolutions or separatist movements genuine solutions to
social problems? Individuals seem to have a greater range of possibilities for happiness: money, clothes, jobs,
travel, sex. As any reader of Atwood’s novels knows, these “remedies” are as shallow as those who promote
them. Indeed, the twentieth century way of life, awash in banal hucksterism reducing people to products and
solving complicated problems during thirty-minute television talk shows, seems perilously close to extinction.
Just keeping afloat in a swill of pollution, exploitation, waste, racism, and sexism is problematical. Proposed
“solutions” to these problems abound, a return to fundamentalist religion being one. The Handmaid’s Tale
gives its readers just such a political climate, and the results are both fascinating and chilling.
Late twentieth century America, saturated with pollution, pornography, sexual license, and a virulent strain of
venereal disease, has erupted. Emerging from the fray is the Republic of Gilead, a theocracy even more
conservative than that of the Puritans, where women are denied independence, education, even their own
names—at least in the case of the Handmaids, who assume the names of their Commanders prefixed by the
possessive preposition “of” (Offred is “of” added to “Fred,” her Commander). In Gilead, women are
reduced to mere functions—Wives, Daughters, Marthas (housemaids), Econowives, and Handmaids—and used
as rewards for loyal service by men to the Republic. Dissident women are declared Unwomen and either
shipped off to forced labor camps or publicly executed. Offred, the narrator of The Handmaid’s Tale, is
among the first group of Handmaids, fertile women assigned to high-ranking childless government officials
and their wives to bear them a child. Haunted by memories of her former freedom, tortured because she does
not know what has happened to her husband and daughter, and scornful of her moral cowardice, Offred
struggles with her version of the truth.
The action of this novel is rather restricted, for Offred’s movements are limited to grocery shopping and
attending Prayvaganzas, Salvagings, and the rare Birthing. Her time is running out. At thirty-three, Offred has
one more chance either to produce a child for her Commander or be killed. Thus, when Fred invites her to
play an illicit game of Scrabble (books are forbidden in Gilead, and women are not allowed to read), Offred
recognizes more than simply a change in her dull routine; she sees the beginning of an opportunity. Soon she
finds herself caught among the desires of her Commander; those of his wife, Serena Joy, who wants a child;
and her own need for human affection. She agrees to Serena Joy’s arranged meeting with Nick, a fellow
servant who is Offred’s surest chance of becoming pregnant. Nick, however, arranges for an unexpected
rescue.
Offred uses flat, almost emotionless prose to define and describe her existence. Weaving between past and an
apparent present (which is later learned to be another past), Offred gives a picture of a terrifyingly real
possibility. Her restrained prose seems at first to be extremely accurate and detached, as if she acts merely as
an observer, one who declines to participate in her life at all. The fact is that Offred remains numb from all
that has happened to her. Besides, she has learned not to trust anyone, least of all herself, a self she believes to
be shallow and weak. Still, she is a grim survivor, planning to keep herself alive whatever the cost. As she
goes forward with her narrative, however, Offred indicates gradual changes in her attitude, the need to take
risks. Able to judge and in possession of an acerbic wit, Offred seizes opportunities when she can.
Not that she has many. Gilead is an almost perfect patriarchy, in which a few elderly men design rules for
everyone else to follow. Ostensibly using the Bible as a guide and justification, the Commanders have
structured a “safe” and orderly society, a society where they enjoy privileges denied to everyone else, where
status is achieved by ideological rightness, where movements are constantly checked, and where anyone
8
might be a spy. There is no longer any abortion or pollution, practically no rape, no apparent social discord,
no lawyers, and no freedom of expression, movement, or religion.
This novel is not merely about a repressive patriarchy; it also explores the conflicts within women, their
uncertainty between traditional values and liberation, their attitudes about behavior, their distrust of one
another, and, most of all, their distrust of themselves. Offred is a prime example. Accepting the circumstances
of her time, she thinks her mother’s militant feminism archaic and her friend Moira’s boldness merely
entertaining. Because Offred thinks that her rights do not need defending, she thinks others’ struggles are
insignificant. Deprived of the very rights her mother and Moira defended, Offred recognizes their true value.
Offred’s relation with the Aunts explores yet another relationship among women, for the Aunts in Gilead are
one of the patriarchy’s primary means of controlling women. As enforcers, they are granted some
prominence and authority (but not guns) to become apostles of a woman’s true purpose: bearing children.
Needless to say, the Aunts ignore the contradiction between their relative freedom and the bondage they
enforce when they preach submission and piety, assuring women that the protection they have is worth the
cost of freedom.
Certainly, women are protected, not only by Angels and Guardians but also by apparel. Costumes identify
role, with Wives in blue, Aunts in brown, Daughters in virginal white, Marthas in green, and Handmaids in
red (still scarlet even in a new society that claims to revere their function). Color identifies rank and role; even
as it separates women, it paradoxically makes them uniform. Offred frequently comments on her shapeless
garment, comparing her protective red sack to the freedom of jeans and sundresses. She often alludes to her
“wings,” a wimple depriving her of peripheral vision, thus preventing her from seeing what goes on around
her. The wimple further obscures her physical identity.
Identity is something to which Offred gave little thought in the past. She has been a stranger to herself and
society, accepting the usual as if it has always existed. Deprivation, however, creates new hungers in her:
curiosity about what goes on in the world, a subversive need for power, a longing for feeling, a willingness to
dare. In many ways, The Handmaid’s Tale is a novel about loss and what it creates. Gilead, in fact, has been
created partially in response to loss. Offred’s Commander explains that for men “there was nothing to work
for, nothing to fight for. . . . You know what they were complaining about the most? Inability to feel.” Offred
finds little comfort in his assurance that feeling has returned.
Feeling, as Offred knows, can be mercurial, often unstable. Perhaps this is why her characterization of other
figures in the novel seems distant. While Offred observes gestures, facial responses, and voice tone, she can
only guess at intent. Messages seem to be implicit in simple language, and she attempts to decode all kinds of
linguistic communication, beginning with the Latin inscription that she discovers scratched in her wardrobe:
“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.” When she is given a translation of this message, however, which
becomes her motto, she discovers that it is corrupt. Language is subject to all sorts of twists. Even though
Offred is desperate for communication, she intentionally obscures her own messages. All this struggle to
understand reflects a familiar theme in Atwood’s work, the inability to understand truly another person,
another situation. Atwood further supports this through the very nature of Offred’s narrative.
An extremely self-conscious narrative, The Handmaid’s Tale constantly calls attention to itself. One plausible
reason, readers later learn, is that Offred has recorded her experiences. Atwood, though, wants to emphasize
the shifting face of reality by having Offred acknowledge the impossibility of telling the truth, by
contradicting what she has said, by mixing hope with experience, by distrusting herself, by stating repeatedly,
“This is a reconstruction.” She goes on to confirm, “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, there are too many parts,
sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can
never be fully described.” While Offred’s struggle to be honest makes her a reliable narrator, she constantly
9
reminds readers of her limits.
Another interesting facet of this narrative is its place in time. Offred tells her story in the present, except when
she refers to her life before becoming a Handmaid. Whatever experience she endures—from the Ceremony to a
Salvaging—she gives her audience an intense sense of the present. Ironically, readers learn that not only is she
telling her story after the events but also that her narrative has been reconstructed and presented to an
audience at a still greater temporal remove. This latter audience, participants at the Twelfth Symposium on
Gileadean Studies held in 2195, is concerned with authenticating Offred’s story, in finding a truth that her
message resists. Thorough research, however, fails to provide firm answers, and the entire narrative remains
equivocal.
All of this is, needless to say, intentional. Atwood’s fiction is rich precisely because of its ambiguity. The
author does provide direction in prefatory quotations. The first, a passage from the Book of Genesis, recounts
Rachel’s reasons for giving her maid Bilhah to bear Jacob’s child. More revealing, perhaps, is Atwood’s
quotation from Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” Like Swift’s satire, Atwood’s skates on the surface
of reality, often snagging on familiar actions (such as bombing family-planning clinics), and only slightly
exaggerating some attitudes, particularly those commonly held about women. Old issues concerning a
woman’s place, the value of her work, her real role in society are the heart of this novel. Atwood’s sustained
irony skewers not only attitudes but also the costumes they often assume. Her description of a dilapidated
Playboy bunny costume, for example, is hilarious. This may lead to the novel’s only weakness, if it is in fact
a weakness.
Atwood has satirized popular culture so often in the past that readers familiar with her work will have no
trouble recognizing her ironic references. Some novice readers of Atwood, however, will doubtless miss the
author’s understated digs at passing social trends. Still, this novel is so rich that even a morsel yields a
pungent taste.
The Handmaid’s Tale, in the guise of speculative fiction, is a deadly serious novel. Again, Atwood challenges
her readers to look carefully at the world around them, to weigh the messages that besiege them, to interpret
carefully the implications of action, and not to yield individuality. Offred certainly discovers that while
submission may create the temporary illusion of safety, no one is safe. Ultimately human beings must risk life
or lose what is most valuable to their experience.
10
Form and Content (Masterpieces of Women's Literature)
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale takes place in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first
century. A revolution sponsored by fundamentalist leaders has produced a monolithic theocracy called the
Republic of Gilead. Although inspired by divine power, the administrators of Gilead rely on human control to
implement their religion-based policies. Overt military control is conducted through a series of agents—such as
Commanders, Eyes, and Guardians—who use electronic devices, blockades, and spies to maintain surveillance
over the population. Those who are not members of the Gilead forces become servants, a role reserved almost
exclusively for women.
Women, who the revolution was supposedly fought in part to protect, are relegated to serving in eight
narrowly defined categories easily identified by the color of their prescribed wardrobe. The blue-clad wives of
the Commanders are the most visible of all the women in Gilead. They are to preside over the Commanders’
homes, create beautiful gardens, and attend social functions, which include public hangings and ritual beatings
of men who break the Gilead rules. The green-clad Marthas are responsible for cooking and keeping the house
clean. Econowives, women married to midlevel members of the Gilead administration, wear multicolored
uniforms to designate their mixed functions as housewife, cook, maid, and mother. A small number of women
wear black, widows whose life is ill-defined in Gilead; as a result, they are rarely seen. Two other groups of
women are not seen in Gilead: the gray-clad Unwomen, those who refused to cooperate with the system and
have been sent to work in the Colonies (where environmental pollution will soon kill them), and the women
who work in the underground brothel, where the Commanders go for pleasures that are officially restricted by
the republic. The remaining two categories of women rival the wives in importance. The Aunts, wearing
Nazi-brown dresses, train the other group to become surrogate mothers. Because of the environmental
pollution, the loss of life during the revolutionary fighting, and the age of some of the wives, sterility has
become Gilead’s most visible problem. The solution to this problem is the procurement of fertile women who
will bear children for the Commanders, the red-clad Handmaids.
The Handmaid is limited to offering her body as a vessel for procreation during bizarre bedroom encounters
with the Commander and his wife. Lying fully clothed in her red habit between the open thighs of the wife,
the Handmaid receives the Commander, who is also clothed except for an open zipper. No communication
between the Commander and the Handmaid is allowed. The sexual encounter becomes both asexual and
pornographic at the same time.
The birth of a child consumes Serena Joy, the wife of one Commander, to such an extent that she accepts the
private nighttime meetings of her husband and the Handmaid Offred in the hope that this might lead to a
pregnancy. These private encounters allow both the Commander and Offred to assume more human qualities
than either is allowed by the republic. Both at first relish the intellectual cat-and-mouse game that develops
between them. Offred continues the game because the Commander provides items that she otherwise would
never have, such as magazines, alcohol, and special soaps. The Commander pursues the game in the hope of
creating a sexual intimacy that is not permitted during the procreation ritual. The game does not produce the
desired result, however, for either the Commander or Serena Joy: Offred does not become pregnant. Desperate
to produce a child for her house and bask in the rewards of Gilead’s society, Serena Joy secretly employs the
Commander’s chauffeur, Nick, to have sex with Offred. At first hesitant, Nick and Offred discover a
sexuality with each other that the republic forbids. Thus, even when the private meetings are ended by Serena
Joy, Offred continues to sneak to Nick’s room when possible. At about the same time, the Commander takes
Offred for a nighttime excursion to an underground brothel. Once there, Offred is reunited with her college
friend Moira, a rebel. Although glad to see her, Offred is dismayed that Moira is a prostitute. Moira explains
that the decision was either to die in the poisonous Colonies or to remain alive and endure—to perhaps escape,
as she has done twice before.
11
Moira’s courage, Offred’s revulsion to the brothel, and her exploitation by another woman, Serena Joy, lead
to Offred’s decision to attempt escape. Befriended by another Handmaid, Ofglen, who has contacts with the
underground, and assisted by Nick, Offred escapes and attempts to reach Canada. During her trip north, she
discovers a tape recorder and tells the Handmaid’s tale.
12
Context (Masterpieces of Women's Literature)
When it was first published, The Handmaid’s Tale was immediately compared to the appearance almost forty
years before of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Both novels suggest that to create a world of
perfect order and stability would require that the imperfections of human beings be brought under control. The
future societies of both novels ban writing, the written word being a weapon feared by those in charge. Both
worlds restrict relationships, reducing them to sterile, superficial role-playing. Violence as a method of control
and citizen participation in that violence appear in both novels. Yet Winston Smith, the main character in
Nineteen Eighty-Four, is a man and has at least a marginal sense of independence and identity. Offred in The
Handmaid’s Tale is a woman who has no independence and has been stripped of all identity.
Because of this difference, Atwood’s novel is closer in relationship to the words spoken by the cofounder of
the modern women’s movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. At the end of the nineteenth century, Stanton was
asked to speak on behalf of women’s rights in the nation’s capital. Her speech, quickly reprinted and
published in newspapers throughout the United States, was about the “solitude of self.” An appraisal of the
forty years that had just passed and a speculation on the future, Stanton’s address was a sober reminder that
regardless of the success of the movement, women must realize that they are individuals first and that each
must encounter the world alone. She implied that no utopia was imminent—nor should it be, because women
are individuals and a collective success approved by all was neither possible nor, in the long run, desirable.
The solitude of self was the acknowledgment of personal responsibility and the courage to endure—the
qualities possessed by Moira and admired by Offred, and the reason that Atwood’s character records The
Handmaid’s Tale.
13
Historical Context
International Conservatism
In the 1980s, the political climate around the globe turned toward fiscal restraint and social conservatism. In
general, this shift was a response to the permissiveness and unchecked social spending that occurred in the
1970s, which were in turn the extended results of the freedoms won by the worldwide social revolutions of the
1960s.
This conservative trend appeared in different forms in different countries. In Margaret Atwood's home country
of Canada, Pierre Trudeau, the Liberal Party leader who had been Prime Minister since 1968 (with an
eight-month gap in 1979-80), resigned in 1984, and the voters replaced him with Progressive Conservative
Brian Mulroney. Margaret Thatcher, who was elected Prime Minister of England in 1979, reversed decades of
socialism by selling government-run industries to private owners. In the United States, the 1980 election of
Ronald Reagan created such a turbulent reversal of previous social policy that the changes sweeping through
the government during the first half of the decade came to be referred to as "the Reagan Revolution."
The Reagan administration's popularity was based on the slogan of "getting government off of people's
backs," implying government regulations had become too cumbersome and expensive for the American
economy to sustain. Reagan's personal popularity allowed his administration to shift the priorities of
government. Military spending was increased year after year, in order to stand up to the Soviet Union, which
the President openly declared an "evil empire." As a result of this spending, the United States became a debtor
nation for the first time in its history, even though social programs were cut and eliminated. The benefits
gained by slashing redundant programs were offset by increases in poverty and homelessness, since many of
the affected programs had been established to aid the poor, and to balance financial inequalities that had
become established by centuries of racist and sexist tradition.
The extreme shift toward conservatism in the United States at that time is significant to the social change that
created the Republic of Gilead in Atwood's imagination. After the novel was published, she told an American
interviewer that she had tried originally to set the novel in Canada, but that it just would not fit the Canadian
culture. "It's not a Canadian sort of thing to do," she told Bonnie Lyons in 1987. "Canadians might do it after
the United States did it, in some sort of watered-down version. Our television evangelists are more paltry than
yours. The States are more extreme in everything."
Religious Fundamentalism
One of the most powerful political groups to affect American politics in the 1980s was an organization called
The Moral Majority. It was founded in 1979 by Jerry Falwell, an evangelist and the host of the Old Time
Gospel Hour on television, to register voters in support of the group's fundamentalist agenda.
Millions of voters registered and identified themselves as members of the Moral Majority, giving the group a
strong voice in national politics. Among the issues opposed by the Moral Majority were the Equal Rights
Amendment, which would have provided a Constitutional guarantee that women would be treated equally to
men; the White House Conference on the Family, which they felt gave recognition to too many varieties of
family structure; and abortion. The issues supported by the Moral Majority included the saying of prayers in
publicly-funded schools, tax credits for schools that taught religious doctrine, and government opposition to
pornography.
The group's impact on American politics was wide-reaching, and politicians running for national and local
offices lined up to pledge their support of the "family values" program that the Moral Majority used to define
their agenda, knowing that they could not win election without appeasing such a well-organized bloc of
voters.
14
Organized Fundamentalists made their mark on the structure of the American government. The Equal Rights
Amendment went unratified when it could not gather enough support. The National Endowment for the Arts
came under national scrutiny and had its budget cut because some of the artists it had benefited had produced
works found to offend standards of decency. Abortion, possibly the key issue of the Christian political
movement, also had its federal funding eliminated, even though attempts to limit or outlaw abortion itself
were fought successfully on Constitutional grounds.
Though sexually explicit publications are also protected by the Constitution, they were studied by a
Presidential Commission on Pornography, which, like most symbolic actions, had little tangible impact; one
large convenience store chain, for example, stopped carrying pornographic magazines but began stocking
them in a few years, after the heat was off.
As the decade wore on, the pervasive influence of the Moral Majority, and of politically active religious
figures in general, wore out. Some policies, such as Reverend Falwell's support of Philippine dictator
Ferdinand Marcos or his opposition to South African freedom fighter Bishop Desmond Tutu, exposed the
group to ridicule and charges of hypocrisy. Falwell left the organization in 1988 to take charge of The 700
Club, a television ministry whose leader had been forced to resign in a sex scandal. The Moral Majority
disbanded the following year.
15
Literary Techniques
In The Handmaid's Tale Atwood again uses her trademark Gothicism to convey the grotesque dislocations
produced by Gilead's social agenda. The hallucinatory imagery filling Offred's narration, usually Atwood's
way of revealing the intense psychic alienation of her protagonists, here derives from horrific governmental
policies made all the more haunting by Offred's matter-of-fact delivery. Harvard Yard has been turned into a
public torture and execution area, with the bodies of "gender traitors" such as homosexuals, rapists, adulterers,
and abortionists regularly displayed as evidence of the fate awaiting the unorthodox. Women participate in
violent group assaults called "particicutions," in which supposed criminals are literally ripped to shreds by
frenzied female mobs. Gilead's extensive behavioral rules eerily contribute to the ominous climate
surrounding women. The red robes and white blinders the handmaids wear, as well as the demure and silent
pairings in which they travel in public, offer only two examples of how Atwood builds the disorienting
atmosphere of the novel. Offred's first-person interior monologue intensifies the reader's experience of the
claustrophobic entrapment women suffer in Gilead. A familiar narrative device in Atwood's fiction, here it
receives two compelling twists, both revealed at the novel's conclusion. One is the sudden opening out of the
text from its Gileadean milieu to a futuristic frame of reference set in 2195, some two hundred years after the
events just described. This epilogue is presented as "a partial transcript" of a yearly conference of academics
engaged in the study of Gilead, now a defunct society primarily of interest to antiquarians. Such a transition
releases readers from the suffocating confinement of Offred's consciousness and offers the reassurance that
the historical nightmare recorded in the text proper has ended. The inter-textual complexity generated by the
tonal layerings of the epilogue qualifies such effects, however. Atwood presents the scholarly conference
satirically, not only exposing the reductive treatment being given Offred's riveting story but raising
provocative doubts about just how much of Gilead's patriarchal repression has in fact passed away. While
women and men function as seeming equals within this academic community, the female chair of the
conference busily orchestrates the social niceties of the occasion as backdrop to the remarks of the male
speaker, Professor James Darcy Pieixoto. The professor reveals a penchant for sexist humor and evinces far
greater interest in discovering the identity of the Commander than in Offred's own story.
Pieixoto also reveals the other narrative "trick" at work in the text: the news that Offred's voice has survived,
not as a written document, but as a series of tape-recordings made after her escape from Boston. Just as the
recovery of women's history is often dependent upon nonliterary and oral forms, Offred's tapes speak across
centuries of a woman's hunger to reclaim and validate her life. Yet the narrative composed from her tapes is
the work of an insensitive male and his faceless assistants who have become interpretive mediators intruding
between the reader and the speaker. The professor entitles their text The Handmaid's Tale — not only a
self-conscious homage to Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales but a smirking sexual distortion of the
great poet's original language. To Pieixoto's final comment, "Are there any questions?" one is prompted to
ask, in true postmodern perplexity, just whose story exists within these pages after all.
16
Ideas for Group Discussions
No other Atwood fiction has aroused the public debate that has accompanied The Handmaid's Tale, and thus it
should provoke lively discussion in any group undertaking to read it. The most obvious focus for attention
should be its provocative thesis that religious conservativism around the world threatens to reverse the gains
of the contemporary Women's Movement and create a nightmarish subordination of women to a reinvigorated
patriarchy. Similarly, readers should examine Atwood's underlying assumption that the oppression of women
has some of its most tenacious roots in theology; while her most obvious target is the West's Judeo-Christian
tradition, she also incorporates elements from Islam and Hinduism, among other religions. Readers might
consider Atwood's claim that there is no political circumstance in the text that she cannot document as having
occurred at some point in the historical past or present — it is worth contemplating the impact of so many such
practices brought together in one social system. For those familiar with other famous dystopias, a brief
comparison with Huxley's Brave New World or Orwell's 1984 might help to clarify the assumptions informing
Atwood's imaginary realm and determine where she agrees with her predecessors' premises and where she sets
forth premises unique to her own vision of ideologically driven totalitarianism.
Another equally controversial facet of Atwood's analysis involves her criticism of the censoring impulses
being unleashed by abuses of public expression and eruptions of violence in free societies around the world.
The novel asks readers to consider the price of freedom and the potential consequences of circumscribing
what can and cannot be said or thought. Atwood is just as uncompromising with feminists as with
fundamentalists on this subject, and she lampoons those in both camps who argue for a monolithic imposition
of their ideology for the "good" of human society; it is worth asking, then, in what ways political idealisms at
any point on the spectrum fall into the trap of absolutism and intolerance.
The novel's evocation of ecological apocalypse invites discussion about the plausibility of its nightmare
scenario and the relationships Atwood draws among consumerism, militarism, and natural catastrophe. Her
placement of infertility at the center of this crisis offers a cunning point of intersection between legal,
religious and scientific arguments about human behavior and could provoke lively debate about alternative
scenarios dealing with the inability of humans to procreate — including ones already surfacing in
contemporary culture such as surrogate motherhood and in vitro fertilization.
1. Why are women the special targets of the new social order devised in Gilead? What other special targets
exist, and why? Why do race and gender hierarchies matter so much to the ruling elite of this world?
2. How does class stratification blur and reinforce the other categories of differentiation in Gilead? Why are
class designations so important to the workings of this society? How are those in the lower social rungs kept
there?
3. Atwood's fictions are routinely set in Canada and involve Canadian characters, but this one is situated
squarely in the U.S. Does her critique of what she once called "Americanism" continue in such a choice?
What does she seem to consider distinctively American about Gilead and the historical and cultural processes
that have brought it into being?
4. Why does religion stand at the center of the backlash Atwood imagines against women's liberation in the
late twentieth century? What premises about women does it permit, and what kind of action on those premises
does it encourage? Why?
5. What is Offred's world view and how does it shape her behavior in the years before the revolution? What is
she like at the start of the novel when she is introduced as a "handmaid?" How does her attitude about her
situation change in the course of the narrative? What prompts those changes, and where do they lead?
17
6. What do the relationships among women both before and after the revolution suggest about women's
responsibility for the nightmare that has overtaken them? How are those tensions exploited and
institutionalized in Gilead to ensure that women will not organize to change their circumstances?
7. What role does Offred's mother play in her daughter's imaginative life? How does she represent the
Women's Movement of an earlier era? In what ways is she satirized? In what ways is she vindicated? How
might Moira be seen as an extension of the older woman — and how is she distinctly different?
8. How does the relationship between the Commander and his wife Serena Joy illustrate the nature of
gendered relationships in Gilead? Are they a happy couple? What fissures exist between them, and what
opportunity for redress does the state provide?
9. Consider the Puritan implications of the novel's New England setting. What is "Puritanical" about the elites'
perspective on sexuality? What promises are made to women about the ways the kingdom will safeguard their
sexual dignity? How does the sanctioned emphasis upon procreativity backfire against women and men both?
What is suggested about the ability of any political system to control the sexual energies of human beings?
11. What is the Commander like? Is he in any way surprising, given his position among the elite? In what
ways is he also a cliché of male tendencies? What does he want from Offred? What does it matter that we
know of others he has attempted to possess in the same way?
12. The concept of "gender traitor" rests upon very definite notions of what constitutes "proper" masculinity
and femininity in Gilead. In what ways can women be gender traitors? Men? Why is homosexuality a
particular target in this regard?
13. What kind of relationship does Offred have with her husband before the revolution? How does political
upheaval change it? What becomes of her family in the revolution's aftermath? How might that earlier
relationship compare with the one Offred develops later with Nick? What does the latter suggest about the
potential of heterosexual bonding beyond Gilead?
14. Why does "telling" this story become so important to the novel's themes about women's voice and its fate
under patriarchies like Gilead? Why does it matter that we have actually been "listening" to tapes Offred
composed after her escape? What does it mean that we are denied the satisfaction of knowing what happened
to her?
15. What does the final framing device of the novel add to our experience of reading this story? What is the
effect of the narrative's projecting us beyond the life of Gilead itself to a time far in the future? Why put
Offred's tapes in the hands of academics who seem only interested in their antiquarian value? Is the work of
feminism really done?
18
Social Concerns
The Handmaid's Tale gives heightened, prophetic urgency to a number of Atwood's long-standing social
preoccupations. The novel is set in a futuristic society called the Republic of Gilead, a new nation resulting
from a fundamentalist coup in what was once the northern United States. The action occurs in Boston and
explicitly recalls Puritan New England, earlier site of a community insistently pursuing a single-minded
messianic agenda. (The Canadian Atwood herself has New England ancestors, one of whom was tried as a
witch and survived hanging; the novel is dedicated to her, as well as to Harvard scholar Perry Miller, with
whom she once studied). Like its historical antecedent, Gilead is a theocracy whose legal, political, and ethical
strictures rest upon conservative interpretations of the Bible cannily used to legitimize a patriarchy of elite
white males who repress the majority of the population through overtly racist and sexist policies.
The inequities of this society are shown to be intimately related to a number of other catastrophes that have
ravaged Gilead. In earlier works Atwood had identified the United States as the locus of a dehumanizing
capitalistic and technocratic ethos which wages war on nature. Gilead dramatizes the inevitable ecological
disasters attendant upon such practices. Nuclear accidents, toxic pollution, virulent new diseases, and the
chemical mistreatment of their own bodies have so reduced the fertility rate among whites that the chances of
bringing a healthy new baby into the world are now one in four. The schism dividing humans from the
ravaged natural world only intensifies human predator-ness and produces a society whose paranoid
isolationism propels it into a perpetual state of war against subversive citizens and supposedly hostile
neighbor states. War becomes a state of mind justifying a pervasive militarism with its attendant drain on
national resources; as such, it reinforces the patriarchal hierarchies that undergird the culture. Gilead bases
this social vision on a religious ideology which sanctions its power politics as God's will; the world of this
novel is shown to be a logical, if exaggerated, expression of the chauvinistic self-righteousness with which
Americans have historically exercised their raw might around the world.
Atwood's indictment of modernity's technocratic assault on nature complements an equally unyielding portrait
of a decadent mass culture whose consumer fetishism, narcissism, and cultural debasement produces
postmodern anarchy and spawns the drastic antidote of a Gilead. As with all dystopias, The Handmaid's Tale
identifies the seeds of its futuristic nightmare in the excesses of the present and suggests the ease with which
those excesses can trigger a violent backlash annihilating the cherished freedoms of the culture it is ostensibly
trying to save. Atwood's treatment of contemporary culture is more ambivalent here than in earlier works,
however. Although she is clearly repulsed by its pervasive corruption of individual sensibility, she cautions
against simplistic efforts to repress its most revolting elements. She thus raises the troubling question: What
degree of liberty can a democratic society safely exchange for cultural stability?
19
Topics for Further Study
Research the techniques used by the government of Nazi Germany to oppress people, such as blacks, Jews,
homosexuals and Gypsies in the 1930s and 40s, and compare them to the methods the Gileadean government
uses to oppress women.
What sort of images would this totalitarian government use to reinforce its control? Design several posters
that might be hung in Gilead to remind women of what sort of behavior is expected of them; or write a song
that handmaids and Marthas might be required to sing every morning.
The abortion issue has been a continuing controversy in the United States, but it was a particularly important
political issue in the mid-1980s, when this novel was published. Read about a prominent figure from that time
who was either strongly pro-choice or strongly pro-life. Report on that person's background, what they are
doing today, and what you think they would say about the Republic of Gilead.
Find an academic history—similar to the "Historical Notes" at the end of his novel—of the Underground
Railroad that was used to free American slaves in the early and mid-1800s. Write a fictional first-person
account, based on details from that work, that explains what the experience might have been like for a slave
trying to escape.
20
Literary Precedents
Much has been made of Atwood's obvious indebtedness to the tradition of dystopian fiction preceding. The
Handmaid's Tale, most notably George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) and Aldous Huxley's Brave New
World (1932). Atwood's work is anti-utopian in its concern with the power constructions whereby
ideologically driven regimes establish and maintain their dominance over select populations. She uses
differentiations based on gender, race and class to imagine a rigidly hierarchical society whose absolutist
cultural values, permitting no compromise, foster brutal persecution of "deviance." Dystopian fictions are
cautionary tales that warn against what their authors view as society's most dangerous existing tendencies.
The nightmarish ambiance born of the genre's characteristic extremism saturates The Handmaid's Tale, whose
alien philosophical and political foundation rests paradoxically upon enough familiar detail to make it
jarringly immediate.
Atwood claims that every abuse and horror of Gilead social policy has either been practiced at one time in
history or has a direct parallel in the contemporary world. She has been faulted by some critics for not having
imagined as self-enclosed and original a new society as exists in Nineteen Eighty-four but Atwood argues that
Gilead is intended as a relatively recent historical development without the temporal leap into the future that
characterizes other such fictions. She also eschews labeling the novel science fiction, preferring to call it
"speculative fiction."
In comparison to this dystopian element, very little attention has been paid to the tradition of feminist Utopian
writing with which The Handmaid's Tale is also in dialogue. Unlike Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland or
Marge Piercy's more recent Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), both of which present idealized communities
where hierarchical gender polarizations and the conflicts they produce are replaced by virtues associated with
female culture such as nurturance and egalitarianism, Atwood's novel posits a dark alternative where female
subservience is the central fact of society.
21
Related Titles
Earlier in the decade that produced The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood published Bodily Harm (1981), a novel
whose protagonist, a Toronto journalist named Rennie Wilford, decides to flee the site of a recent mastectomy
and her resultant sense of deformation for the sunnier climes of the Caribbean, which she plans to make the
subject of a glib travel piece. Instead, she is exposed to raw political tyranny as she finds herself unwittingly
caught up in the stuff of an international thriller even though her point of view on the action remains
decidedly marginal and uninformed. Bodily Harm, then, offers a political primer on the fusion of gender and
nationalism within the structures of patriarchy that Atwood expands so dramatically in The Handmaid's Tale.
In Rennie she creates a woman who, like Offred, has been lulled by her relative privilege to believe herself
immune from the abuses visited on the powerless, only to find "She is not exempt. Nobody is exempt from
anything." She too is imprisoned and must move beyond her conditioned feminine acceptance of the victim's
role to discover avenues of active resistance and moral empowerment. And as a writer, she recognizes that her
most subversive talent lies in telling honestly what has happened. Whether she actually escapes to achieve her
goal remains as mysterious as Offred's ultimate fate.
22
Adaptations
The immense popularity of The Handmaid's Tale and its provocative themes led to its translation to the screen
in 1990. Considerable international filmmaking talent was involved in completion of the project: German
filmmaker Volker Schlondorff directed (best known in the U.S. for The Tin Drum, 1980, and the 1985 TV
version of Death of a Saleman); playwright Harold Pinter wrote the screenplay; high profile Hollywood stars
Robert Duvall (as the Commander) and Faye Dunaway (Serena Joy) joined Victoria Tennant (Aunt Lydia),
Aidan Quinn (Nick), Elizabeth McGovern (Moira), and Natasha Richardson (Kate/Offred) in the cast; Daniel
Wilson produced the $13 million project for Cinecom. The film was marketed and reviewed extensively, and
premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in the city where Atwood says she began writing the novel in 1984, but
it received mixed critical response. The structural complexity of the novel was sacrificed to create a
chronological staging of events leading to a far more conventionally heroic and less ambiguous ending;
Offred was given the pre-Gilead name Kate and was made more active in her own behalf; the love story was
showcased at the expense of the novel's ideological critique (no doubt a result of the difficulty Wilson had in
raising money for the project given its themes, particularly its feminism). The screenplay, albeit satisfactory to
Atwood herself, necessarily abandoned the interiority of the novel, created by Offred's ongoing monologue,
and instead opened out the action to give visual immediacy to the peculiar mores of daily Gilead society.
Schlondorff, at first reluctant to undertake the project, finally accepted when he began envisioning the work
"from a Kafka angle rather than as a political prophecy."
The acting is strong and the cold precise beauty of the screen imagery successfully conveys the paradoxical
familiarity and strangeness that account for the terror aroused by this brave new world. Richardson is too
young and nubile to convey Offred's precarious circumstance as a handmaid near the end of her fertility, but
she does capture Offred's tentativeness. Duvall effectively blends the banal and the sinister in portraying the
Commander; Dunaway aptly depicts the brittle surfaces and barely suppressed rage of Serena Joy. But while
the film is unsettling, it lacks the emotional or intellectual impact of the novel.
23
Media Adaptations
The Handmaid's Tale was adapted as a film by Volker Schlondorff, starring Natasha Richardson, Faye
Dunaway, Aidan Quinn and Robert Duvall, screenplay by Harold Pinter, Cinecom Entertainment group, 1990.
The author is interviewed on "Margaret Atwood," which is a videotape from the Roland Collection of Films
on Art/ICA Video of Northbrook, Illinois. 1989.
Another video about the author is "Margaret Atwood Once In August," distributed by Brighton Video, New
York, NY, 1989.
"Margaret Atwood" is the name of a short, 1978 video recording from the Poetry Archive of San Francisco
State University.
Atwood is featured in the educational film "Poem as Image: Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer," from the "A
Sense of Poetry" series produced by Cinematics Canada and Learning Corporation of America.
This book is available on audio cassette as "Margaret Atwood Reads from The Handmaid's Tale," by
American Audio Prose Library of Columbia, Missouri, 1988. It is #17 in the "A Moveable Feast" series.
Actress Julie Christie reads The Handmaid's Tale on a two-cassette audio tape recording available from
Durkin Hayes Publishers in 1987. Order #DHP7214.
Another audio tape recording of The Handmaid's Tale is the eight-cassette collection produced by Recorded
Books of Charlotte Hall, Maryland, in 1988. Order #88060.
"Margaret Atwood: An Interview with Jean Castro" is an audio cassette produced by American Audio Prose
Library of Columbia, Missouri, in 1983. Order #3012.
24
What Do I Read Next?
Margaret Atwood followed this book with Cat's Eye in 1988. Some of the same concerns show up in the later
book; a controversial painter returns to the city that she grew up in and runs into old friends and the memories
of old friends.
Marge Piercy has always been associated with Atwood, mostly because both write poetry and fiction from a
feminist perspective. Piercy's book most like this one is Woman on the Edge of Time, her 1976 novel with
some science fiction elements to it. The main character, confined to the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital,
must learn to behave the way that her oppressors expect of her, but she also travels in time to the future, to the
year 2137, with a fellow inmate.
Critics examining The Handmaid's Tale's sinister view of the future often compare it to George Orwell's 1984,
which is considered the standard bearer for dystopian novels. Published in 1949, it tells the tale of a society
where government surveillance techniques have been perfected, so that every move that citizens make can be
monitored and regulated, and of the struggle of one man, Winston Smith, to be free. The other dystopian that
is usually mentioned at the same time as 1984 is Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Published in 1932, the
futuristic society imagined by Huxley has many similarities to our own: citizens use pills to control their
moods, babies are born in laboratories, the masses are distracted from disapproving from the government by
"Feelies," which are like movies that entertain with sight, hearing and touch. Like Atwood's and Orwell's
novels, the problem with total government control is that it interferes when the protagonist falls in love.
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, published in 1963, gives a frightening view of the future,
concentrating on the lives of juvenile delinquents and speculating about which is worse: their inhuman crimes
or the mind-control techniques used by the government to stop their violence.
Carol Ann Howell's recent book on Atwood, entitled simply Margaret Atwood (1996), has some complex and
insightful points about Atwood's works in general. The chapter "Science Fiction in the Feminine" is especially
useful to students for its examination of how the female perspective puts a different slant on the science
fiction tradition and how this genre is particularly useful for conveying feminist concerns.
25
Bibliography and Further Reading
Sources
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986.
Barbara Ehrenreich, "Feminism's Phantoms," in The New Republic, Vol. 194, No. 11, March 17, 1986, pp.
33-5.
Joyce Johnson, "Margaret Atwood's Brave New World," in Book World.
Robert Linkous, "Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale." in San Francisco Review of Books, Fall, 1986, p.
6
Amin Malak, "Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and the Dystopian Tradition," in Canadian
Literature, Vol. 112, Spring, 1987, pp. 9-16.
Joyce Maynard, "Briefing for a Descent Into Hell," in Mademoiselle, March, 1986, p. 114.
Mary McCarthy, "Breeders, Wives and Unwomen," in The New York Times Book Review, February 9, 1986,
p. 1.
Peter Prescott, "No Balm in Gilead," in Newsweek, Vol. CVH, No. 7, February 17, 1986, p. 70.
For Further Studv
Arnold E Davidson, "Future Tense: Making History in The Handmaid's Tale," in Margaret Atwood: Visions
and Forms, edited by Kathryn van Spanckeren and Jan Garden Castro, Southern Illinois University Press,
1988, pp 113-21.
Examines how the imaginary country of Gilead is more of a reflection of a state of mind than a political
reality. Also included in this book is an autobiographical forward by Margaret Atwood.
Barbara Ehrenreich, "Feminism's Phantoms" in The New Republic, Vol 194, No 11, March 17, 1986, pp. 33-5.
Interprets the novel as a warning about feminism's repressive tendencies.
Mark Evans, "Versions of History: The Handmaid's Tale and Its Dedicatees," in Margaret Atwood. Writing
and Subjectivity, edited by Colin Nicholson, St. Martin's, 1994, pp 177-88.
Gayle Greene, "Choice of Evils," in The Women's Review of Books, Vol. 3, No 10, July, 1986, p 14.
Green compares the novel with other writers of feminism by Marge Piercy and Dons Lessing. She concludes
that the novel presents a critique of radical feminism.
Amin Malak, "Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale' and the Dystopian Tradition," in Canadian
Literature, Vol. 112, Spring, 1987, pp. 9-16.
Examines how Atwood's feminist focus distinguishes her novel from dystopian classics like Huxley's Brave
New World and Orwell's 1984.
Margaret Atwood: Language, Text and System, edited by Sherrill E. Grace and Lorainne Weir, The University
of British Columbia Press, 1983.
Published before The Handmaid's Tale, this book analyzes Atwood's use of language. Some of the essays here
are written for a professional level, but most are informative and meticulously detailed.
26
Madonne Miner, '"Trust Me': Reading the Romance Plot in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale," in
Twentieth Century Literature, Vol 37, No 2, Summer 1991, pp. 148-68.
Explores the theme of love in the novel and its link to survival.
Barbara Hill Rigney, Madness and Sexual Politics in the Feminist, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1978.
Views four feminist authors—Bronte, Woolf, Lessing, and Atwood—in terms of their treatment of madness in
their work.
Jerome H. Rosenberg, Margaret Atwood, Twayne Publishers, 1984.
Traces Atwood's career up to The Handmaid's Tale.
Roberta Rubenstein, "Nature and Nurture in Dystopia: The Handmaid's Tale," in Margaret Atwood: Vision
and Forms, edited by Kathryn Van Spanckeren, Jan Garden Castro, and Sandra M. Gilbert, So. Illinois Press,
1988, pp 101-12.
Discusses the issue of nature and nurture in the novel.
Hilde Staels, "Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale: Resistance through Narrating," in English Studies,
Vol. 78, No. 5, September, 1995, pp. 455-67.
Focuses on the narrative structure of the novel and shows how the task of narrative becomes a crucial part of
the main character's resistance to oppression.
Charlotte Templin, in a review in The Explicator, Vol 49, No. 4, Summer, 1991, pp. 255-56.
Examines the relationship of setting and theme in the novel.
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Bibliography (Critical Guide to British Fiction)
Grace, Sherrill E., and Lorraine Weir, eds. Margaret Atwood: Language, Text, and System. Vancouver:
University of British Columbia Press, 1983. Includes nine essays examining Atwood’s literary “system” and
her development of style and subject matter up to the publication of The Handmaid’s Tale.
Greene, Gayle. Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1991. The author discusses Atwood and other contemporary women writers who employ narrative
strategies that incorporate women’s perspectives and challenge traditional modes of storytelling. She sees The
Handmaid’s Tale as less feminist in vision than Atwood’s previous novels.
Hammar, Stephanie Barbe. “The World As It Will Be? Female Satire and the Technology of Power in The
Handmaid’s Tale.” Modern Language Studies 22, no. 2 (Spring, 1990): 39-49. The article discusses The
Handmaid’s Tale as a work with satiric intent. Atwood warns of the abuses of technology, the domination of
women by men, and the propensity to allow oneself to be trapped in a rigid role.
Kostash, Myrna, et al. Her Own Woman: Profiles of Ten Canadian Women. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada,
1975. Contains a biographical essay by Valerie Miner, “Atwood in Metamorphosis: An Authentic Canadian
Fairy Tale,” that examines the evolution and maturation of Atwood’s writing.
McCombs, Judith, ed. Critical Essays on Margaret Atwood. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. This valuable volume
contains thirty-two reviews, articles, and essays on Atwood’s prose and poetry. The essays are arranged in
chronological order. The volume contains a primary bibliography to 1986.
Mendez-Engle, Beatrice, ed. Margaret Atwood: Reflections and Reality. Edinburg, Tex.: Pan American
University Press, 1987. This selection of critical essays on Atwood’s work includes an interview with
Atwood. The essays trace Atwood’s development as a writer and include a discussion of her use of fables.
Rigney, Barbara Hill. Margaret Atwood. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1987. An analysis of Atwood
as poet, novelist, and political commentator, all from a feminist perspective. Includes a useful bibliography.
Rosenberg, Jerome H. Margaret Atwood. Boston: Twayne, 1984. A concise literary biography of the
Canadian novelist and poet that provides a useful introduction to her works.
Van Spanckeren, Kathryn, and Jan Garden Castro, eds. Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. This useful collection contains essays on Atwood’s works that are
of uniformly high quality. Several essays deal with The Handmaid’s Tale.
28
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Source: Critical Guide to British Fiction, ©1987 eNotes.com, Inc.. All Rights Reserved.
Source: Critical Guide to Censorship and Literature, ©1997 eNotes.com, Inc.. All Rights Reserved.
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Source: Critical Survey of Contemporary Fiction, ©2005 eNotes.com, Inc.. All Rights Reserved.
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Source: Masterpieces of Women's Literature, ©1995 eNotes.com, Inc.. All Rights Reserved.
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Source: Literary Masterpieces, Volume 9, ©1987 eNotes.com, Inc.. All Rights Reserved.
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