The Handmaid's Tale

Themes
1. Utopias/Distopias
  1. "From a distance it looks like peace"
    1. Therefore at the heart of Gilead there is not peace, just the illusion meaning Gilead itself is a fantasy
2. Feminism
  1. "two-legged womb"
  2. Body isn't "solid" but a "cloud" around her womb which is her most important feature
  3. Feminine attempts to lighten the novel never hide the misery boredom and dangers of her situation
    1. Offred's narrative illustrates the difference between a woman's private narrative of memory and the grand impersonal narrative of history
3. "Doubled, I walk the street
  1. Externally: Handmaids are like personification of feminine submissiveness and companionship
  2. Internally: Handmaids are parody of femininity acting out masquerade hiding Gilead's oppression
    1. By reminiscing about Sunday walks with her long lost husband she is resisting to everything Gilead stands for
    2. Offred refuse to be subjugated by Commander's violation, instead becoming an explorer of her own dark inner space
      1. Becomes a transforming metaphor (womb expands until it assumes cosmic proportions) as well as a analogy
  3. "Doubled" links to her many doubles during the novel; Ofglen (Revolutionary), predecessor (room), Commander's wife (Commander's sexual attentions), Ofwarren (brainwashed Offred)
    1. All these women then linked by the patriarchal regime which oppresses them
4. Irony
Context/Critiques
1. Postmodern Critiques
  1. Genres merely social constructions, historically and ideologically responsive to society in which we live
    1. 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
    2. 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
Motifs
1. Red
  1. Scarlett women are "ancient vessels" and sisters are "dipped in blood"
    1. Shows Gilead's fascination with and vilification of female sexuality
  2. "I tell the time by the moon. Lunar, not solar" connect to her talking about blood - link between moon cycle and menstrual cycle
2. Propaganda
  1. "Gilead is within you" - Aunt Lydia
    1. Link to "The kingdom of God is within you"
    2. Gilead is a state of mind not just a territorial state
3. Likens blank space on the ceiling where the light fitting has been removed to "wreath" or "frozen halo"
  1. Behind blankness (of every day life) lies Offred's insistent fears of torture, injury and death
4. Love of puns, arbitrary connections between words that sound same but mean different
  1. How word "chair" may refer to "the leader of a meeting" or "a mode of execution"
    1. And means flesh in French
    2. Word play shows her sharpness of mind and her moral refusal to flatten language as Gilead does, which leads to confusion
Symbols
1. Garden
  1. Offred uses "we" and "our" when talking about garden
  2. 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
  3. Place of Romantic fantasy
    1. "a Tennyson Garden", "the return of the word swoon"
      1. In this part of the text traditional images of femininity breathe through the prose as garden breathes in the light and heat of summer
    2. Observes process of metamorphis
    3. the willow tree whispers promises of romantic trysts
  4. feminised emblem of sexual desire
    1. Not attached to the Virgin Mary's enclosed paradise even though Serena Joy - who owns the garden - wears the virgins colour blue when gardening
2. Religion
  1. The phallic power in the novel is underpinned by the Bible
Characters
1. Offred
  1. She pictures herself as a heroine of romance
    1. Her imaginative celebration of natural beauty and fertility shows heroic resistance to Gilead's sterile patriarchal power
      1. Internal Resistance is major part of her character
  2. In Chapter 41 she apologises to the reader, evokes guilt
  3. 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
    1. She is a self conscious narrator who is aware of her own "limping and mutilated" narrative
      1. 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
      2. Offred's storytelling process invents her won listeners in whom she must believe as she needs to gesture to a world outside Gilead
    2. Storytelling is a way of surviving
      1. Offred's narrative is discontinuos - Atwood "Details, episodes seperate themsleves from the flow of time in which they are embedded
      2. 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."
  4. Story told from her point of view - "ignorant peripherally involved women
2. Moira
  1. Always known by first name as never becomes a Handmiad
    1. To offred embodiment of female heroism, to Gilead a "loose women"
      1. Has not escaped at all
3. Serena Joy
  1. Got famous by being pro ultra-conservative domestic policies
    1. Ironic as now stuck in home she wished for
4. Nick, the Commander and Luke

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	Created by Oliver Hanney about 8 years ago