Interpretations and Epigraphs

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The Reader's Interpretations

The whole structure of the novel challenges it's a reader. In the first chapter, we are plunged into a strange situation where there has clearly been an extreme change in society and gradually reveals information about Offred and her situation.

Epigraphs

Genesis 30:1-3

From the Old Testament, describes the jealous Rachel's solution to her inability to bear a child: asking her husband to use her servant Bilhah as a surrogate. According to the Bible, the twelve tribes of Isreal are descended from the sons that the patriarch Jacob fathered with four different women (Leah, Racheal, Bilhah, Zilpah.

Not only is the story used by the Gileadean theocracy to justify the use of Handmaid's as surrogates for elite couples, but it also reminds us that in this totalitarian dictatorship barrenness is always said to be the 'fault' of the wife as opposed to the husband.

These Bible verses form the backbone of the Gileadean system of state-regulated reproduction and are sued to legitimise the ways in which infertile women are devalued and degraded. They also inspired the names of the sinister 'Racheal and Leah Re-education centre' foreshadowing the ways in which the lowly handmaids are taught to accept their inferior status and subservience to the official wives.

Jonathan Swift's A modest Proposal (1729)

Is a depairing and vicious satirical pamphlet. Swift offers what he terms a 'modest proposal' for saving hordes of Irish babies and children from starvation by cooking and eating them instead of offering a range of tempting recipe options such as boiling, frying, baking and fricasséeing.

In suggesting that the problem of the desperately poor having children they cannot afford can be solved simply by selling off surplus babies for food, Swift presents his apparently insane scheme of state-sponsored cannibalism to an implied audience that might have taken the idea seriously.

In quoting this master satirist, Atwood signposts her intentions to hold up a mirror to the serious social problems she has identified within her own contemporary cultural context.

Sufi Proverb

"In the desert there is no sign that says, Thou shalt not eat stones"

The first key idea that links to Handmaid tale is that under extreme conditions the human survival instinct is extremely strong

secondly that the state doesn't need to involve itself in regulating every aspect of its citizens' private lives since legislating against the obvious is self-evidently pointless.

Atwood implies that no totalitarian regime can ever really destroy our essential humanity and that the Gileadean regime's creepy micromanagement of its citizens' lives is completely unwarranted.

CONTEXT: Sufism is a mystical Islamic based religion whose followers believe that people should try to find God purely as an act of love, seeking to repent of their sins and be of good character as they go about their daily lives.