The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale

1. Themes

   • Utopias/Distopias
     • "From a distance it looks like peace"
       • Therefore at the heart of Gilead there is not peace, just the illusion meaning Gilead itself is a fantasy
   • Feminism
     • "two-legged womb"
     • Body isn't "solid" but a "cloud" around her womb which is her most important feature
     • Feminine attempts to lighten the novel never hide the misery boredom and dangers of her situation
       • Offred's narrative illustrates the difference between a woman's private narrative of memory and the grand impersonal narrative of history
   • "Doubled, I walk the street
     • Externally: Handmaids are like personification of feminine submissiveness and companionship
     • Internally: Handmaids are parody of femininity acting out masquerade hiding Gilead's oppression
       • By reminiscing about Sunday walks with her long lost husband she is resisting to everything Gilead stands for
       • Offred refuse to be subjugated by Commander's violation, instead becoming an explorer of her own dark inner space
         • Becomes a transforming metaphor (womb expands until it assumes cosmic proportions) as well as a analogy
     • "Doubled" links to her many doubles during the novel; Ofglen (Revolutionary), predecessor (room), Commander's wife (Commander's sexual attentions), Ofwarren (brainwashed Offred)
       • All these women then linked by the patriarchal regime which oppresses them
   • Irony

2. Context/Critiques

   • Postmodern Critiques
     • Genres merely social constructions, historically and ideologically responsive to society in which we live
       • Linda Hutcheon argues post modern fiction highlights specifities of location which challenge conventions which are presumed to be universal, fictions critical emphasis is now on resistance to generic conventions
       • Atwood: "Both Utopias and Dystopias have the habit of cutting off the hands and feet and even heads of those who dont fit in the scheme" - ironic as shows utopia for some is anothers dystopia

3. Motifs

   • Red
     • Scarlett women are "ancient vessels" and sisters are "dipped in blood"
       • Shows Gilead's fascination with and vilification of female sexuality
     • "I tell the time by the moon. Lunar, not solar" connect to her talking about blood - link between moon cycle and menstrual cycle
   • Propaganda
     • "Gilead is within you" - Aunt Lydia
       • Link to "The kingdom of God is within you"
       • Gilead is a state of mind not just a territorial state
   • Likens blank space on the ceiling where the light fitting has been removed to "wreath" or "frozen halo"
     • Behind blankness (of every day life) lies Offred's insistent fears of torture, injury and death
   • Love of puns, arbitrary connections between words that sound same but mean different
     • How word "chair" may refer to "the leader of a meeting" or "a mode of execution"
       • And means flesh in French
       • Word play shows her sharpness of mind and her moral refusal to flatten language as Gilead does, which leads to confusion

4. Symbols

   • Garden
     • Offred uses "we" and "our" when talking about garden
     • In Chapter Offred rhapsodises over garden's full bloom finding in this a moment where she transcends her physical constraints to enter otherness of natural world
     • Place of Romantic fantasy
       • "a Tennyson Garden", "the return of the word swoon"
         • In this part of the text traditional images of femininity breathe through the prose as garden breathes in the light and heat of summer
       • Observes process of metamorphis
       • the willow tree whispers promises of romantic trysts
     • feminised emblem of sexual desire
       • Not attached to the Virgin Mary's enclosed paradise even though Serena Joy - who owns the garden - wears the virgins colour blue when gardening
   • Religion
     • The phallic power in the novel is underpinned by the Bible

5. Characters

   • Offred
     • She pictures herself as a heroine of romance
       • Her imaginative celebration of natural beauty and fertility shows heroic resistance to Gilead's sterile patriarchal power
         • Internal Resistance is major part of her character
     • In Chapter 41 she apologises to the reader, evokes guilt
     • likens structure of her story to a dismembered body and then as a story personified as a victim of torture or as one of the walking wounded after a battled
       • She is a self conscious narrator who is aware of her own "limping and mutilated" narrative
         • Fragmented structure, isolated secenic units, gaps and blanks, dislocated time sequence, her own hesitations and doubts
           • We learn at the end that we are reading transcript from jumble of cassette recordings, the story is the reconstruction of Offred's reconstruction of her story after she escaped
           • Yet storytelling is the only possible gesture against the silences of death and history
         • Offred's storytelling process invents her won listeners in whom she must believe as she needs to gesture to a world outside Gilead
       • Storytelling is a way of surviving
         • Offred's narrative is discontinuos - Atwood "Details, episodes seperate themsleves from the flow of time in which they are embedded
         • Atwood wrote novel exploring meaning of surviving
           • Offreds first priority is surviving dangerous Gilead physically - "I am alive, I live, I breath, I put my hand out, unfolded into the sunlight
             • She retains this rigourous survival instinct even in most threatening circumstances
             • Second is surviving physiologically
               • She does this through storytelling
                 • "What I need is perspective . The illusion of depth ... otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be."
     • Story told from her point of view - "ignorant peripherally involved women
   • Moira
     • Always known by first name as never becomes a Handmiad
       • To offred embodiment of female heroism, to Gilead a "loose women"
         • Has not escaped at all
   • Serena Joy
     • Got famous by being pro ultra-conservative domestic policies
       • Ironic as now stuck in home she wished for
   • Nick, the Commander and Luke