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Summary The Handmaid's Tale - symbols and themes
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Notes on key symbols and themes prevalent within the story
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Symbols and themesColour red
- Appears constantly throughout novel
- Colour of the handmaids – associated with shame and with ripeness and fertility
- Offred uses it to describe blood, the life force that runs through her body, a marker of violence and
death
Blood on executed criminals
- Used to describe the colour of the tulips in serena joy’s garden
Flowers are sex organs but heir flourishing will be futile – serena joy snips off their fruits
The eye
- Represents – paranoia, surveillance and Gilead’s authority
- Offred worries that anyone she meets might be an eye
Offglen, doctor etc.
- Sees eyes everywhere – tour guides badge, her own ankle tattoo
- Eye plastered over the light socket in her room – imagines it as a blinded eye
Finds out that the previous handmaid hanged herself from the light fixture that used to be there –
blinded eye comes to signify death and freedom
Makeup
- Contradictions relating to power and sexuality
- Signifies – femininity, the past and Offred’s loss of freedom to control her appearance
- Commander – thinks lack of makeup is a source of freedom
Women don’t have to use their appearances to compete for men
- Commander enjoys going to jezebel’s – women all wear makeup with hope of attracting business
- Handmaid’s shouldn’t attempt to be beautiful – would add another layer of difficulty for the wives and
the commanders they serve
- Offred does her best to maintain her appearance – saves butter as moisturising lotion
Even in a house with no mirrors
Gender roles
- Gilead a hierarchical society – huge difference between the genders
- Gileadean revolutionaries taking control (following terrorism destroying the US government) – fire all
women from their jobs and drain their bank accounts
Offred – left desperate and dependent
Luke – doesn’t seem furious at the turn of events
o Subtle suggestion that even good men have embedded misogynistic attitudes
- Gilead takes common views to the logical extreme
- Gileadean women – have all their liberties taken from them
From right to choose their clothes to right to read
- Women in positions of power (aunts) – only allowed cattle prods and not guns
- Commanders wife – once a powerful supporter of far right-wing religious ideas about how women
should stay at home
Unhappy in the world she advocated for
- Gilead – institutionalised sexual violence towards women
Jezebel’s – whorehouse for society’s elite
- Ceremony – commander tries to impregnate Offred
Institutionalised adultery and a kind of rape
- Story critiques religious right – shows feminist left is not the solution
Exemplified by Offred’s mother
- Radical feminists – advocate book burnings, censorship and violence
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